Red Sparrow is a lot to take in. The film stars Jennifer Lawrence and is directed by Francis Lawrence, the guy who directed The Hunger Games part 2, The Hunger Games part 3 and The Hunger Games part 3.2. The fourth collaboration of the Lawrences should make for a familiar formula, but Red Sparrow is anything but. It’s the complete opposite of a young adult romantic drama. Don’t take your kids.
Red Sparrow is like a a test of resistance. It’s slow-paced, extremely and realistically violent, and all sorts of campy (those Russian accents?). It’s a movie that while not for everyone, is much better, or at least more daring, than half of the movies that are being made in Hollywood today. That’s including The Hunger Games part 1,2,3 and 3.2.
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One of the weirdest aspects of the movie— and there’s a lot of them— is the fact that Charlotte Rampling, a 72-year-old academy award nominated actress, is the Headmistress at a “whore school.” If you don’t know anything about Red Sparrow, the plot of the film revolves around Dominika Egorova, a prima ballerina who suffers an accident and is left unable to dance. She does something dumb afterwards and, with no other options left, joins Sparrow School, a secret evil agency where people are trained as sex spies. This all happens because it’s Russia, and that apparently makes sense.
In Sparrow School, aka Whore School, as Dominika lovingly refers to it, there’s the Matron. Portrayed fearlessly by Rampling, this lady is meant to turn Dominika into a weapon of sex, capable of extracting all sorts of information with the use of her sexuality. Sparrow School is a place where they train sex monkeys because there’s nothing sexier than a Russian girl, at least in the eyes of Hollywood.
Throughout the movie, Jennifer Lawrence proceeds to dance, train, get naked, get beat up, and get naked again until the film’s closing moments. It’s fun and good if you can tolerate the poor accents and the unending twists and turns, but the reason you should stick around is because of Charlotte Rampling’s sex-ed lessons which will make you question the meaning of life.
