I just saw this, and I am amazed at how bad much of this, especially towards the start of the film, was. Completely tasteless and uninterested in exploring the somewhat compelling premise, this is another "twisty" spy thriller that, in the vein of movies like Atomic Blonde, is primarily concerned with making the violence and sexuality presented here as lurid and appealing to pervs as possible. Some of the stuff later on, as Lawrence's character plays American and Russian spies off of each other, is somewhat engaging, but much of the first hour is nonsensically awful for a couple reasons. The first is a plot-related one:DarkImbecile wrote:Red Sparrow (Francis Lawrence) I had heard that there were walkouts when this premiered because of its harshness, and went in ready to look down condescendingly at the delicate souls who couldn't handle some gritty violence and sex in their spy thrillers, because really: how rough could a vehicle for Jennifer Lawrence from the director of the Hunger Games franchise be? So imagine my surprise when I walked out thinking, "That was too harsh." Not because the violence, sex, and sexual violence is breaking any Noe-esque barriers, but because Lawrence (the director) leans into the brutality but fails to invest enough in the characters and their ultimately cliched and/or superficial motivations to make the sadism feel impactfully shocking rather than calculatedly lurid. If you’re making a spy thriller in which the cast can’t be bothered to speak actual Russian, you can’t also insist that you’re bravely investigating the darkest underbelly of international espionage. Lawrence and Edgerton are fine given the limitations they’re working within, but some of the supporting cast is wasted - particularly Jeremy Irons - aside from Charlotte Rampling’s “Matron”, who should have had another 15-20 minutes of screen time.
This same focus on female-performed sex acts extends to the spy school sequences, where female candidates are made to watch BDSM porn, stripped, and forced to perform sex acts on male soldiers and a gay man (in one of the movie's awful jokes) on camera to be reviewed by the Russian intelligence brass, while none of the male candidates, with the exception of the one that rapes Lawrence, are shown doing anything more sexual than stripping. All of this adds up to create a good 20-30 minute chunk of the movie that feels like disgusting fanfiction for the raincoat crowd, with the kicker being that none of the "lessons" taught at the school even mattered - Lawrence ends up seducing Edgerton in an identical way to any number of other Mata Hari stories. I'm not squeamish, nor do I have any sort of aversion to or bias against movies with explicit sexual content, but this movie uses sex in one of the scummiest ways I've seen in a long time, in a way I thought had died with the grindhouse theater. Not all of the movie is atrocious in this way, but it plunges so far past the point of no return so quickly that none of the rest could redeem it.