Thus, Lawrence’s character Dominika joins Charlotte Rampling’s spy school (or ‘whore school’ as they choose to refer to it in the film) so she can help Mother Russia and her actual mother who is suffering from an unnamed illness. During the spy training montage (one of the least fun training montages I have ever seen, absolutely no Survivor on the soundtrack) ‘sparrows’ learn to use their target’s desires to manipulate them to get what they want, all for the good of their country. According to Red Sparrow it’s a very sex-based career. I couldn’t help thinking that if I was a Russian spy who had gone through years of training, I’m not sure I’d be best pleased by such a reductive view of my life’s work. That said, the training montage shows absolutely no fight training, only sexy stuff and picking locks, and thus J Law goes into the field with what looks like zero combat training. Perhaps she picked up her eventual fight skills at ballet school. Crucially, the relationship between Lawrence’s character and Joel Edgerton’s American spy Nate should be the lynchpin to the film, but the audience never sees why you should believe that they truly care for each other. All we’re presented with is two people who like a bit of classical music and are partial to a bit of swimming. The film reunited Jennifer Lawrence with the director of the list three The Hunger Games movies, Francis Lawrence, but this isn’t either of them at their peak. It never really gels, and the end result underwhelms. The short bursts of action are good, if gratuitously violent, but the rest of the film struggles to hold the attention. Red Sparrow is un UK cinemas from March 1st.
title: “Red Sparrow Review” ShowToc: true date: “2025-08-13” author: “Tania West”
Indeed, death and desire are longtime staples of the spy movie, but likely pitched both to publishers and studios as the femme fatale’s perspective, Jason Matthews’ novel and the glossy Hollywood version starring Jennifer Lawrence that followed attempt to deconstruct and humanize what CIA vets euphemistically call “honeypots.” In Russia they’re apparently called Sparrows, at least per this film, and there is nothing glamorous about being the woman sharing martinis and murder at the hotel bar. A movie retro in its global politics, but modern in its gender roles, Red Sparrow is nothing else if not audacious for a star vehicle. Taught to use her body to manipulate assets, it is her precocious streak that gets our heroine on the fast track to seduce an American handler from Langley (Joel Edgerton) and unearth beneath his covers who the CIA mole is in the Russian SVR. But as Edgerton attempts to woo the spy over into defecting to the U.S., a nicely layered fog of intentional confusion arises. Constantly, audiences will be asked to speculate where Dominika’s true allegiances lie. From the get-go, it is apparent this a pivotal project in Lawrence’s career. While she has long stood out playing old souls who were wiser than their years, Red Sparrow’s Dominika is an attempt at something more adult and sensual, especially when compared to the films that she last teamed with director Francis Lawrence to do in the trio of Hunger Games sequels. Now playing the person who chooses who lives or dies, rather than volunteering for it, she has never been in a more empowered, or explicitly sexualized, part. Yet this frankness is one of the film’s better aspects. Francis Lawrence aims to shock viewers with the brutality of spycraft, like the sudden rush of sunlight on the morning after. This effect is more provocative than it is artful, but it gets to the core of what Red Sparrow is: a slow-boiled counterbalance to the spy fantasies of atomic blondes and Americanized superheroes. In these moments of excess, both Lawrences find the lurid grace of an enemy’s throat opening wide, which elevates the otherwhise conventional narrative beats. As a general story, Red Sparrow’s emphasis on spy movie tropes causes its labyrinthine plot to overstay its welcome at nearly two and a half hours. Rarely succinct, the film’s desire to be as minimal as vegetation in a Russian gulag can cause the film to have a deliberate pacing. Evocative of spy thrillers of the 1970s—and sometimes as bleak as them—this approach leads to intermittent bursts of tension, as opposed to a steady rising hiss of dread. Still, there are a number of genuinely eerie set-pieces, including Dominika’s first “assignment,” the manipulation of an American traitor selling government secrets, and what happens when the unnamed Russian president is unimpressed with your progress and sends you to be “interviewed” by security forces. Red Sparrow is probably too downbeat and bitter to be quite the mainstream hit it’s marketed as. Even the romance between Dominika and Edgerton’s Nathaniel Nash is icy by design. When your film dives into the dregs of winter, it isn’t exactly looking for anything colorful to blossom. Yet the picture’s aloofness plays to the strengths of Lawrence as a screen presence. Quiet, aggrieved, and usually biding her time, it is in moments like when Dominika plans vengeance against those who stole her ballet career that a violent passion stirs behind her stoic face. Lawrence is an actor who is often most at home when her character is giving the stare of death to her enemies. In Red Sparrow, that just constitutes as foreplay.
