Red Sparrow

(★★★✩✩)

REMEMBER Black Widow from the Marvel superhero movies?

The butt-kicking Russian spy who is not above using her feminine wiles to get what she wants (even managing to trick the Asgardian God Of Mischief once), and is manipulative and influential enough to calm the Hulk down?

Well, if you thought Jennifer Lawrence’s Russian spy in Red Sparrow

is going to be like that, you’re going to be quite disappointed.

Lawrence plays Dominika, a former Russian ballerina forced by her uncle, a devious Russian intelligence officer, to become a Sparrow – a Russian covert agent trained in the arts of seduction.

She is later tasked with getting close to a US spy named Nash, in order to sniff out a mole in the Russian government.

Whether or not you’ll like this movie depends a lot on how you feel about Lawrence’s acting.

She gives a passable performance here, but in the latter parts of the movie, her unsmiling, almost expressionless portrayal of the tortured, manipulative Dominika begins to grate on you.

Still, the story is at least engrossing enough to make this a pretty intriguing spy thriller. If you like your spy movies dark, gritty, and psychologically scarring, then

Red Sparrow might just be your cup of tea. If not, and you want a bit more action and attitude in your spy thrillers, then you’d be better off waiting for a solo Black Widow movie.