Twelve-year-olds who loved the first Hunger Games can now legally buy Red Sparrow‘s very-much-R-rated ticket. That’s not far from the Hunger Games films’ Katniss, another Lawrence and Lawrence collaboration, though I expect audiences will feel more revolted watching her give a jerk a boner than get attacked by deadly bees.
What’s left is cold and perverse, heat provided only by the satisfying ways Dominika out-thinks the creeps while pretending to be their “magic pussy.” This is a film about a woman faking polite to save her own neck while remaining alert to how everyone else sees her. He refuses to let us leer at Jennifer Lawrence’s long legs without a jab of shame. But director Francis Lawrence drains the pleasure out of seeing a pretty girl in her panties. If Dominika was broken, or worse, if we enjoyed watching her break, the film would be unforgivable. At least no one could say she hadn’t tried. She was scared to disobey, so she flung herself at the mutt until it shied away. Her manipulations reminded me of a story from Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace’s autobiography. Once, before knocking at Nash’s apartment, she dry heaves to convince him she’s a vulnerable thing who’s been knocked around. In the over two-hour film, she smiles twice, cries twice, and vomits twice, and only the puking is sincere. Lawrence’s Dominika lies when she needs to and tells the truth when it’s a better weapon, and barely half the time can we guess which is which. Her silence frustrates, but it also feels honest - not documentary honest, but emotionally honest - because most victims don’t have literally killer glutes. In every scene, you want to see Lawrence scream at her superiors. These men are idiots, all of them, from the klutzy ballet partner who ruined her career, to the monsters who forced her into this place, to the middle-management bureaucrats always trying to take credit for female sparrows’ ideas. Her hand jobs will be publicly graded, and when she bloodies a jealous classmate for attempting to rape her in the shower, a Russian officer (Jeremy Irons) tsk-tsks, “Why not let him have you?” He’s clearly an ass, as is her uncle who claims he’d never let a target hurt his niece, but is too pig-headed to include sexual assault. On day one of Sparrow training - or “whore school,” as Dominika sneers - the headmistress (Charlotte Rampling) asks her to strip for the class. That’s exactly what she’s pretending to be. With her round cheekbones and smooth limbs, Lawrence looks like a factory-stamped doll. Yet by the end, you want to give every Bond villainess a hug. So Lawrence tucks away a piece of her character’s soul that the film never makes her reveal. “Don’t give him all of you,” cautions Dominika’s (of course) disabled mother (Joely Richardson) when her powerful uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts), a thin-lipped Putin clone, carts her away to camp. It shows how fantasy tigresses get made by men, to help men, with help from a few pitiless women in navy blue suits. Vicious, empty vamps get my eyes rolling so hard I could never machine-gun a target, let alone in stilettos. Red Sparrow‘s trailer appears to sell more phony femmepowerment.
It’s a Hollywood coincidence that these emotionally damaged jujutsu experts also look like, say, Charlize Theron - at least Red Sparrow admits it’s selecting for hotties. In lieu of personality, they get perfect hair. Like vases, characters like Dominika tend to be hard and pretty and hollow, perhaps embellished with a surface etching of trauma, say a murdered boyfriend, an imperiled loved one, or in Black Widow’s case, a broken womb.
RED SPARROW JENNIFER LAWRENCE CRACK
When an oligarch caresses a scar on Dominika’s leg, he murmurs, “Like a crack in a vase.”
Lawrence’s Dominika Egorova is repeatedly reminded that her body belongs to the state, like a lamp or a pen. They’re merely disposable playthings to be discarded after riffling Bond’s pockets. (Marvel called theirs Black Widow.) Yet, it fits with the film’s mindset that Moscow doesn’t consider these women and men - yes men, too - action heroes. It’s a strange name - surely, there are scarier things to call a Russian ballerina-turned-babelicious-agent. Mid-thigh squeeze, James Bond should have tapped Xenia Onatopp on the knee and asked, “Tell me about your education?” Perhaps she, too, was a Red Sparrow, the name given to seductive Soviet fembots in Jason Matthews’ best-selling novel-turned-leather-slicked spy flick starring Jennifer Lawrence as State School 4’s latest cadet commanded to seduce American CIA officer Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton).