Review: Red Sparrow

Red Sparrow
Cert: 15 / 140 mins / Dir. Francis Lawrence / Trailer



And like that March is upon us, which can mean only one thing: The year's first Graveyard Slot™. The home of all the movies which aren't worthy enough to go up against the Awards-nudgers of Jan/Feb, and not loud or jazzy enough to be scheduled alongside the superhero flicks that populate the rest of the year. It's a sad state of affairs, but there we are. The release-window yields some fascinating oddities, of course, as distributors take a gamble on their less-categorisable fare and some unexpected gems come our way.

This isn't one of them, though.

Modern-day Russia*¹. When promising Bolshoi ballerina Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) is badly injured during a performance*², the loss of her dancing career threatens to tear her fragile family apart. But Dominika's uncle Dimitrevich in the Russian government (Matthias Schoenaerts) offers an alternative way to make use of her talents, by becoming a ruthless spy and extracting information from American agent Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton). Obviously in this game, truth is a commodity as flexible as currency, and trust is even harder to come by…

While it's certainly a solid enough premise for a story, Red Sparrow is best at being a very ordinary, throwback thriller, boasting a strong primary cast and an impressive supporting-array of British acting talent (Charlotte Rampling, Joely Richardson, Jeremy Irons, Ciarán Hinds), none of whom can carry their intended accents from scene to scene. And while she's basically fine in the central role, you never forget you're watching 'Jennifer Lawrence In A Film'. For a secret agent, she sure stands out. The screenplay delights in being grotesquely provocative, albeit a way as thoroughly hackneyed as the steamy thrillers it thinks it's better than.

More quiet brooding than calculating action, this isn't as tense or dynamic as its trailer might suggest, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, there just isn't enough intrigue to fill the vacuum which is left behind. Unfortunately, Jennifer Lawrence and Joel Edgerton receive neither the plot nor direction to be able to lose themselves convincingly in their performances. While I'm all for complex characters, the script has our main players be so wilfully convoluted that their actual motivations cease to matter after around 90 minutes. After that I just waiting for it to either kick off, or end.

It occasionally kicks off, and it takes its sweet time to end. While the film certainly has its moments, there's just too much padding between them to make a satisfying movie. At least Charlize Theron didn't need a sit down and a little cry every time she had to get her hands dirty.

A calculating cultural juxtaposition, Jason Matthews' 2013 source-novel has been heralded by those in the know for its detail and authenticity. If Francis Lawrence's film follows suit and realism is this disbelievable, then maybe in the 21st century war of misinformation, the Kremlin has already won…

Think of the plot-layering and overall lack of emotional resonance in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, mixed with the self-satisfaction of Bridge of Spies.



If it's raining and you've got two and a half hours to kill.



Stream it.



It isn't.



Not for long, the film isn't worth arguing over.



There isn't.



Level 1: Uncle Owen and Captain Panaka are in this.





*¹ There's a line dropped into the script early on referencing social media, a nod to the audience to let them know that the film is either set 'now' or in the very recent past. So imagine my subsequent amusement when some International Secrets™ are sold, bought and delivered on five 3.5" floppy disks, the slow, bulky and pitifully small data-storage format that the '90s couldn't get rid of quickly enough. I suppose this is fantastic security for each agency as nobody else would be able to conveniently read what's on them. "I just have to verify the data" says Comrade J-Law, firing up a conspicuously modern laptop which presumably has a USB floppy drive attached that the cinematographer goes out of their way not to show us. Then again, Joel Edgerton is still using a pen-and-paper encryption method here. I expect the eventual arrival of a fax machine is going to blow his mind… ^{[ BACK ]}

*² Her leg snaps. Across the shin. Just like that. I think the skinny male-dancer she's prancing around with accidentally somehow puts five times his own body-weight on it or something. It looks painful enough and then you think - wait, what? Dancer, trained, athletic. Leg, snapped. "Sorry, I can't come into work today Terry, my leg's snapped". Not to get too spoilerific, but she's interrogated at one point later by a bloke hitting her with a cosh and nothing snaps then. I'm definitely banking 'snapped leg' for the next time I want to sneak in a mid-week #FilmDay… ^{[ BACK ]}


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Maggie

Maggie
Cert: 15 / 95 mins / Dir. Henry Hobson / Trailer



What a weird state of affairs this is for zombie-fans; where a box-office draw who is also a generally underrated actor brings us one of the lamest examples of what can be achieved with the genre, and an equally powerful (commercially, at least) figure who is usually the cinematic equivalent of a paperweight brings us one of the best.

In a time not too far from our own, humanity, indeed global civilisation, is being royally challenged by the Necroambulist virus, a contagious disease which transforms its victims into snarling, drooling carnivores devoid of empathy (or indeed civilisation). After becoming infected whilst exploring alone in a devastated city, Maggie is detained by the authorities, kept under medical supervision and is about to be shipped to one of the government's approved Quarantine Centres when her father Wade, a crop-farmer from Kansas, locates her and persuades the doctors to let her come home until the infection reaches the critical point of The Turn. But can Maggie be trusted to roam freely with a dangerous condition that the medical establishment are still learning about? And can the inhabitants of her small hometown be trusted to let a flesh-eating timebomb roam in their midst..?

Most importantly, Maggie works perfectly well as a zombie-flick; if you want to enjoy it on a literal level, that won't be a problem. The film's undead-epidemic follows (mostly) the established structural format, so the script keeps medical and social exposition to a minimum, relying on the audience knowing how this sort of thing works by now. The area where it slips away from the pack (yet still doesn't feel the need to over-explain itself) is the progression of the virus itself. Whereas in most films of the genre a bite results in a fatal fever and reanimation usually within a matter of hours, the Necroambulist infection takes around eight weeks to reach its conclusion, over which time the subject can walk, talk and interact as normal, albeit with progressing symptoms of zombie-ness. Most intriguingly, because the virus in the film is a slow transformation which doesn't use host-death as the binary division-line, "The Turn" (as it's called in the film) can be effectively snapped-out-of, up to a point at least. Dramatically, this is the film's trump-card as the central character can both beloved daughter and feared monster, if not simultaneously then alternately at least.

But like all the best zombie movies, Maggie purposely doesn't use The Z-Word, and works better when it's viewed as an allegory for another issue; in this case, the coping mechanisms of AIDS sufferers*¹, their families and communities. Leaving aside the cataracting eyes, pitch-black blood and decaying flesh, it's a remarkably delicate film. While Abigail Breslin is magnificent in the title role, it has to be said that the film wouldn't work without Ol' Arnie as her father, either. I have to join the crowd on this one and say how refreshing it is to see Schwarzenegger in a role which is genuinely different for him, and he's a good casting-choice for Wade, as he doesn't over-egg the pudding of earnestness (although credit is also due to director Henry Hobson for not letting him, either). Arnie still doesn't have a massive range, of course, but at least the screenplay lets him try his hand and doesn't reduce him to a gurning catchphrase-machine.

Visually, the film is of The Walking Dead school, with all but one of the scenes desaturated to the hilt. Rather than the lingering desolate landscapes however, lens-master Lukas Ettlin prefers the hand-held closeup, yet the agoraphobic result is still the same: the person who's the most scared in the film is the monster herself.

I promise you, you've never seen such a thought-provoking film which also features two zombies making out. If your cinema is showing two Arnie films this week, pick this one.

Maggie is another film with a very sparse cinematic release, but if you can, do.



Rental; you may not get too many watches out of it before the metaphor becomes too apparent to make it properly enjoyable.



Breslin is outstanding, Richardson is capable, Schwarzenegger is far better than he has any right to be.



Absolutely.



Probably not too much.



There isn't.



Abigail Breslin starred in 2013's August: Osage County, as did Ewan 'Kenobi' McGregor.
(All roads lead to Kenobi, today.)







*¹ It could well apply to all terminal (especially contagious) diseases, but the attitude of the non-infected characters in the film leans heavily toward that of the early days of HIV/AIDS when little was known and treatments were as optimistic as they were pharmaceutical. And it's a heavy-handed allegory, sure, but how much to you want to tiptoe around small-town prejudice?

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.