"Red Sparrow," starring Jennifer Lawrence, is a trashy espionage movie full of graphic violence, over-the-top plot and underdeveloped characters. The convoluted plot, culled from novels by former CIA operative Jason Matthews, is so hard to follow that at the halfway point, I just gave up. Lawrence plays Dominika Egorova, a Russian ballerina who is crippled by another dancer while on stage. With her career destroyed, Dominika has to find another way to support her invalid mother so she turns to her Uncle Vanya (not joking, here), a sleazy sexual predator and mass murderer who also happens to be one of Russia's leading super spies. Vanya, a vision of consummate evil played with creepy sensuality by Matthias Schoenaerts, ruthlessly recruits his niece into a secret organization dedicated to turning attractive Russian boys and girls into sex machines called Red Sparrows, spies who will do anything with their bodies to seduce their victims into surrendering information. The training program is run by a cold, efficient and amoral task-master (Charlotte Rampling), who proves successful in turning Dominika into a first-rate spy who is raped and mutilated across Budapest, Moscow, Vienna and London while tracking an American CIA operative, Nate Nash (Joel Egerton), to discover the identity of a mole in the Russian government.
The torture sequences (including rape and a scene where Russians use what looks like a medieval cheese grater to shred skin from Nate's body) are so gruesome that you wonder why this only has an R rating. There's little chemistry between Lawrence and Egerton although they work hard to bring the movie to life. "Red Sparrow" tries to take advantage of the current anti-Russian sentiment so it's no surprise that Schoenaerts looks alarmingly like Vladimir Putin. The movie is stylish and tense enough, but it has no soul.
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