'Red Sparrow': What the Critics Are Saying

The reviews are in for the Jennifer Lawrence-led spy thriller Red Sparrow, and the consensus is that the movie is more style than substance.

In the film based on James Matthews’ novel of the same name, Oscar winner Lawrence teams up with a familiar director — Francis Lawrence, who worked with her on three of the four Hunger Games films. Red Sparrow centers on a Russian spy trained to use seduction to gain information. Following a dramatic injury, former ballerina Dominika Egorova (Lawrence) is pushed to enroll in the fictional Sparrow School, a brutal spy program that trains people to wield their bodies as weapons of the Russian government (“Your body belongs to the state”). In real life, special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election bolsters the otherwise fictional storyline, reminding audiences that the Cold War — as the film makes clear — is not fully dead.

In early reviews, the film has a 57 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, critic John DeFore predicted that Red Sparrow will be generally disappointing to audiences. “Striking a sometimes uneasy balance between trust-no-one espionage and sensationalism, Sparrow seems likely to attract a fairly large audience but leave few moviegoers fully satisfied,” he wrote. Though Lawrence “performs unimpeachably,” she is clearly “better than the material.” He also expressed frustration with a climatic scene in which “the filmmakers require Dominika to do something very stupid and very implausible” so that an antagonist can live a little longer.

“Given current geopolitical realities, we're probably due for a big wave of Russophobic genre cinema. Red Sparrow helps get the ball rolling, but here's hoping we see better before Putin & Co's devastating use of social media makes all this one-on-one spycraft seem laughably quaint," DeFore wrote.

Source :- hollywoodreporter