For Jennifer Lawrence, 2011 was very much a breakout year for her. First, she earned an Oscar nomination for her role in the rural drama Winter’s Bone. After that, she appeared as Mystique in the surprisingly successful reboot of the X-Men franchise, X-Men: First Class. And then, that same year, she was cast in the lead role of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. The first adaptation of author Suzanne Collins’ best-selling book series hit theaters the following year and was a major critical and commercial success. This success for both Lawrence and the Hunger Games franchise continued the following year with the even more critically/commercially successful Catching Fire, which was the first of the series to be directed by Francis Lawrence (who, for the record, is unrelated to his lead actress). At the time, Lawrence was mainly known for his work in music videos. Some of his most famous videos included Aerosmith’s theme from Armageddon ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’, Shakira’s first big hit in the United States ‘Whenever, Wherever’, and the iconic video for Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’. Alongside that, he also directed the 2007 blockbuster hit I Am Legend and the 2005 film adaptation of DC Comics’ demon-hunting anti-hero, Constantine. And as for The Hunger Games, his work on Catching Fire led to him being brought back to direct the franchise’s two-part finale, Mockingjay. But now the two Lawrence’s are back for a new film, Red Sparrow. Based on the 2013 novel of the same name by former CIA operative Jason Matthews, the film sees Lawrence star as a seductive Russian agent. And while both Lawrence’s do their best with the material, it ultimately isn’t enough to make up for the film’s lackluster narrative and sluggish pacing.
As the film begins, Russian ballerina Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) suffers a devastating career-ending leg injury during her latest performance. With no way of supporting herself and her sick mother Nina (Joely Richardson), Dominika agrees to a job offered to her by her uncle Ivan (Matthias Schoenaerts), who’s a top-ranking member of Russian Intelligence. Dominika is tasked with seducing a corrupt Russian politician to extort information from him; however, the job ends up going south when the politician is murdered by an assassin. After learning that this was part of Ivan’s plan all along, Dominika is then coerced into a new proposition; be executed so that there are no witnesses to the murder or become a member of Russian intelligence. Dominika agrees to the offer and is sent to a remote school where she is trained to become a ‘Sparrow’, agents capable of extracting information from their targets through seduction. When Dominika proves to generally excel in her training, she is sent to Budapest to investigate into a suspected Russian mole codenamed ‘Marble’. To figure out the mole’s identity, Dominika must meet and earn the trust of a CIA operative named Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton) who is also stationed there who was reportedly the last known person to work with ‘Marble’. But as Dominika begins to find ‘Marble’, she also finds herself locked into a game of cat and mouse where the threat of execution from her superiors is always imminent.
To the film’s credit, it starts off on a solid note. After a tension-filled intro that effectively sets up its two main leads, the build-up in this film is quite excellent in terms of the situation that Dominika ends up getting into. In other words, this film does have a legitimately engaging story at first. However, this ultimately ends up getting ruined by two things. The first is the film’s hefty runtime of nearly two and a half hours. Now, to be clear, this is very much one of those ‘slow burn’ kind of stories AKA the ones that are more dialogue-driven than action-driven. Despite this, though, it does feel like a half hour or so of the film could’ve been trimmed out without even losing anything important from the story. The other thing that hurts this film is that the story itself, unfortunately, falls apart by the end. Despite a few reports that stated that the ending of the film was changed from what occurred in the novel to give it a stronger feminist tone, the ending ends up being incredibly banal. Without even spoiling anything about what happens at the end, let me just say that you’ve seen how this one is going to play out before in other films. You know, the kind of ending where the main protagonist makes a critical power move that ensures her the best option for survival? That is exactly what happens at the end of this film. I mean, at the very least, the film itself isn’t poorly made on a technical level. Francis Lawrence reteamed with a lot of his Hunger Games collaborators for this film and they once again produce a film that’s well-shot and features some solid fight sequences.
And as far as the film’s cast is concerned, they’re all solid in their respective roles. It all begins, of course, with Jennifer Lawrence who, as always, is giving it her all here. She does do an excellent job in terms of conveying her character’s ability to seduce her targets while also showing her vulnerable side when put through the story’s most emotionally taxing moments (which, to be perfectly frank, are quite frequent in this film). In other words, she possesses an effective magnetic screen presence in this film despite all its narrative issues. Her role in the film is also very well-balanced with Joel Edgerton’s character; obviously, Dominika is still the focus of the story, but the film does just enough to set up the character of Nate Nash without having Edgerton overshadow Lawrence at any point. Plus, it also helps that the two have solid enough chemistry when it comes to their romantic scenes. But as for everyone else in the film, while they all do fine in their roles, these roles are quite limited when compared to Dominika and Nate. Jeremy Irons is great as always as enigmatic Russian general Vladimir Korchnoi as is Charlotte Rampling as ‘Matron’, the imposing headmistress of the school that Dominika goes to as part of her ‘Sparrow’ training’. Matthias Schoenaerts walks a fine line between charismatic and sinister as Dominika’s uncle Ivan while Mary Louise Parker manages to slip in a few humorous jokes into this generally solemn narrative as an American chief of state that Dominika interrogates as part of her investigation. Ultimately, though, a lot of these side characters end up being incredibly one-note, often getting sidelined in favor of our main protagonists.
It’s a shame, really. I really wanted to like this film as much as I did Francis Lawrence’s three Hunger Games films (I even warmed up to Mockingjay Part 2 a bit more upon my most recent re-watch of it). Ultimately, though, Red Sparrow is unfortunately waylaid by its incredibly bland narrative. While it does start off solid enough, it then loses steam at the end with a ‘been there, done that’ ending that serves as a mediocre conclusion to a story that has been going on for way too long. Thus, as much as I don’t like to compare films that boast similar plots in my reviews, this film does feel like a weaker clone of what we got last summer in David Leitch’s action-thriller Atomic Blonde. But while Atomic Blonde also had an admittedly simple plot, it just had a lot more ‘oomph’ to it compared to Red Sparrow. Sure, the film is decently shot, and Jennifer Lawrence is great as always in the lead role, but that doesn’t really make up for this film ultimately leaving not that much of an impression. It legitimately makes me curious as to how the ending played out in the novel. Heck, I bet that even if that ending was just as conventional as the one that they went with for this film, it still would’ve been a lot more substantial than what we ultimately ended up getting. Thus, while far from being the worst film that Jennifer Lawrence has been in (and no, I’m not going to mention that ‘other’ film here; let’s be honest, folks, you know exactly which one I’m talking about…), Red Sparrow is an unfortunately disappointing outing for this talented director-actress duo.
Rating: 2/5
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