Red Sparrow: Honey-dicking for a living
The Plot
Jen is Dominika, a Russian ballet dancer, in fact the dancer, the top 1, the Prima something... She’s crushing it (Dominika, not Jennifer). She’s a superstar.
So, of course, there’s a Tonya Harding type character right behind her who wants the job. Said jealous bitch enlists her boyfriend, also a dancer and Dominika’s partner in the company’s next gig, to drop her down when they do the Dirty Dancing move. The operation is a success: broken leg for Dominika = career over.
Career over means no more apartment + no way to care for her ill mother. Enters Ivan (of course “Ivan”…), Dominika’s handsome yet super sinister uncle who works for some obscure branch of the secret services (some three-letter acronym thing, KGB, FSB, KFC, VHS... I can’t remember). He cares for little niece (who’s super creeped out). He shows that the accident was no accident. Dom’s pissed. There is hell to pay. She might be a ballerina, but she is no push-over and has a pretty violent streak, it runs in the family.
Still… vengeance doesn’t pay the bills. So Uncle offers a solution! He has this cool gig, work for him and problem solved. Dom smells something fishy plus Uncle’s definitely creepy. So, thanks but no thanks!
But uncle blackmails for a living, so he’s persuasive. Dom has no choice!!! Beautiful innocent girl with a broken dream is destitute, her back against the wall so she reluctantly accepts. She is sent on a sort of simple try-out gig, to get into some bad dude’s pants and schmooze his cell phone post-coitum. Et voila, easy, make plenty of Rubbles, pay rent, buy scarf… all good and settled. Walk in the park. “This prostitute job yes?” she says. “No” he replies “this Patriot job!”. She doesn’t buy it but, she’s in no position to argue… so she puts on the red dress and goes to work!
The walk in the park turns into a category 5 shit-show: she gets the gitters, doesn’t want to be a “patriot” anymore, but gets brutally raped and avenged at the same time as the rapist get his throat sliced as he is doing the raping on top of her! Instant karma. Problem is, she wasn’t supposed to see the killing part, so she must be whacked. Uncle talks to the big cheese “no need to whack her, she has potential. As it happens there is a new secret program that “trains recruits in psychological manipulation”, (meaning seduction… or just honey-dicking really) to turn them into “weapons in the global struggle for power”… So there, just sent her to sex-spy school aka the Red Sparrow Academy. The big cheeses are convinced. Deal!
This time there is not much talking. Try a negosh about lodging and health care, but a bullet in the neck? No thanks. So, Dom goes to Siberia. She’s rebellious, undisciplined and not so much into the BDSM stuff, as the frigid mistress of the dungeon (known as Matron) says her “only problem is that she has a soul” (I practically wet my pants at that amazing line). But, it turns out it makes her a good student! She graduates with honors and is sent on a mission to try to identify a Russian mole whose former BFF on the US side is… Nate Nash!
And that’s really where the movie starts or should start. Because Nate is a stand-up guy with a pretty solid sense of ethic, not very popular with his hierarchy which makes him the right fit for Dom! She must entice him enough so that he pillow-talks the name of his contact in Moscow, the aforementioned mole. Everyone has their own private agenda that somehow deviates from their bosses’. From there, the usual spy-movie stuff: faux-twists, real-turns, true-lies and sincere-deception. In an attempt to score originality points it’s spiced up with an appallingly uncreative attempt at representing the weaponization of seduction and creative torture tutorials…
Dashometer
From the distance (See initial trailer on: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpmAR4oRUXg) Red Sparrow looks mysteriously enticing and supernaturally attractive… like… Jennifer Lawrence in a red dress! There is suspense, drama, action! But… it’s a trap! Of course! It’s a spy movie about the art of “psychological manipulation”! So what kind of movie-goer are you:
1- Driven, serious, no-nonsense (slightly full of yourself). You have no time for frivolities. When you go to the movies, you want the best yield out of your fourteen-dollar-and-two-hour investment. You’ve been deceived and manipulated! The movie is really, really awful. Even Jennifer can’t save it, in fact at times she sinks with it.
2- Loose, relaxed and out for a good time (slightly gullible). Maybe a little weed or a glass of wine and good company. You will see beyond the matrix and through the movie’s deception! You have outsmarted them! You are the double agent! And you get to laugh a lot because seriously, it’s so bad it’s hilarious. It’s been a week and I can’t stop laughing.
No matter what I think about the movie, its plot twists, its acting, I must confess that it was very successful at one thing: being about an innocent dancer turned elite honey-dicking spy by way of a state sponsored training program teaching the art of seduction… it did honey-dicked me.