Red Sparrow (2018)

Bolshoi ballerina Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) is hurt in an on stage accident that will later turn out not to have been an accident at all. In any case, she will not be able to dance again on her old level, leaving her and her sick mother without much of an income or even a place to stay, for even their apartment belongs to the ballet company. Fortunately or unfortunately, Dominika’s uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts) is deeply involved in the world of espionage and is perfectly willing to provide his niece with a way in, especially after he has provided her with information concerning the truth about her accident and is probably quite satisfied with the talent for violence she then demonstrates.

Eventually, Dominika lands in a school for sexspionage (headmistress: Charlotte Rampling) where she shows talent as well as a rather unwanted spine. Thanks to her uncle, and one General Korchoi (Jeremy Irons), she soon is set upon her first case/victim. There’s a highly placed mole somewhere in the Russian secret services, and Dominika is supposed to seduce the mole’s handler Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton) to find out their identity. Dominika for her part might have plans, perhaps even feelings, all of her own.

Francis Lawrence’s spy novel adaptation Red Sparrow is an at times rather impressive watch, yet it it is also full of niggling little problems. The most obvious faux pas right from the start is the filmmaker’s decision to have all the Russian characters – none of whom is actually being played by a Russian actor, pretty much the only nationality where that sort of thing is still allowed without people on the Internet shouting angrily – speak with mild, fake Russian accents, because clearly, all Russians talk in accented English with each other, right? It’s definitely the sort of decision that already starts the film up feeling highly artificial. The movie’s problematic idea of Russia is further increased by its portrayal of the little it shows of the country’s culture as exclusively inhabited by rapists and human monsters. The film’s portrayal of the political side of things seems to have little to do with actual Russian nationalism and the way it works today and much more with a US-style nightmare vision of their old enemy turned new enemy but actually staying completely the same. Which would bother me much less if the US secret services at least were played a little less like a goody-goody bunch who apparently don’t do horrible things on a daily basis. Edgerton’s Nash is such a nice, careful, pleasant and loveable guy it is impossible to buy him as a spy, for whatever country.

And still, I had a lot of fun watching this thing, once I had adjusted my perspective on it towards it being a really high budget exploitation film of the kind nobody makes anymore (and really, that was seldom made at all even in the past). It’s a surprisingly unpleasant film for what at its core is a mainstream spy movie, full of torture, sexual violence, threats of sexual violence, and a lot of random nasty stuff put in just to make the film feel extra gritty. There is, for example, no reason at all to give our heroine’s uncle the incestuous hots for her apart from making him even less pleasant than he already is; it’s like adding kicking dogs as an additional vice to Hitler. The thing is, director Lawrence turns out to be a great big budget exploitation director, so all these scenes of suffering, vice, and men not named Edgerton behaving toxically, only to be punished by our heroine in one way or the other, are unpleasant to watch in just the right way to be entertaining, and not just only in the “did that big Hollywood production honestly just do that?” kind of way. The film has a melodramatic, operatic drive to it, really digging into the core of making movies you enjoy to cringe at. And like with a lot of good exploitation fare, you can perfectly well argue the whole she-bang is actually a feminist film about a tough woman with an untouchable moral core beating all the asshole men in her life with their own vices.

It helps that Lawrence the actress seems – as usual – in absolute control of her abilities, not attempting to portray Dominika as a normal person but the sort of heightened, iconic near-mythological being that exists in this sort of plot. It’s an honestly great job at point-exact overacting through a lot of grim facial expressions, never laying it on too thick, but always exactly as thick as the film needs. Her counterpart Edgerton – usually a fine actor - is surprisingly colourless, but then, what’s a guy to do when a script doesn’t give him any actual personality beside being as morally upright as a knight? The rest of the cast does traditionally fine character actor work (sadly, Irons isn’t there to do more than look thin, pale and sad), so it is difficult not to enjoy the film at least on this level.


But then, I’ve never pretended to dislike exploitation films, so I’m certainly not going to start complaining when I see one made by talented people who have been provided with a lot of money for excellent outfits and only the best locations and sets.

Assassin’s Creed (2016)

If you have played any of Ubisoft’s five thousand Assassin’s Creed games, you’ll know what this thing’s about. Otherwise: Templars bad, assassins good, history is a lie, we need that artefact. To be more precise, we need the Apple of Eden because it “contains the genetic code for free will”.

Frankly, the film’s dreadful, even when I put on my glasses with the highest possible tolerance for blockbusters and very carefully keep in mind what these films can and can’t do. It’s not just that the script is stupid, with character motivations that never make any damn sense at all and a plot that lacks any hooks that might make it exciting and a structure which misses any kind of effective throughline. The writing also makes the bizarre mistake to take all the AssCreed Templars versus assassins nonsense much too seriously, treating it as the most po-faced melodrama imaginable throughout, seemingly completely impervious to the fact that much of the tropes it uses are extremely silly, perhaps even outright goofy. Of course, that’s a problem the franchise’s games also tend to suffer under. A lightness of touch would not necessarily mean not taking emotional beats and metaphors seriously, but rather approaching them from an angle that makes sense. I don’t want to trot out Marvel Studios’ films as an ideal example how to do it again, but they are the obvious comparison, getting their tones just right without losing dramatic weight or excitement.

However, the script isn’t the film’s only problem. It’s also pretty boring from the perspective of sheer spectacle, a problem I can only fault director Justin Kurzel (last seen by me when directing the fantastic The Snowtown Murders) for. Kurzel apparently can’t direct a decent action sequence to save his life, so most of the fights and chases here are messed up by pointless sweeping camera movements, editing I can only call random and the director’s total inability to fulfil one of the most crucial rules of filmmaking when creating scenes that find characters traversing a dangerous environment: turn the environments into physical spaces in the audience’s minds. Otherwise, an action scene becomes just a series of random, pointless movements and shots of demonstrative coolness that never show anything that actually is cool because there’s no context to any of what we see. It’s like a musical whose director doesn’t realize he actually needs to show the dancers properly. There’s also a general air of emotional detachment surrounding the action scenes, something too abstracted, as if the film were going down a check list of what it needs to include but never finds any actual excitement in what it shows.

Because all these problems just don’t make the film quite tedious enough, Kurzel (or whoever actually is the guilty party) also decides to have his actors go through the (usually dumb) dialogue with all the emotional involvement of rocks, wasting a bunch of highly talented actors on the po-faced, lifeless staring of automatons. Not even Jeremy Irons’s big bad gets a decent moment of megalomania. Even the games don’t take themselves serious enough to make this particular mistake (and they are also much prettier to look at and more or less fun to play in the right-sized doses).

On the positive side, Marion Cotillard’s haircut is excellent. The production design is pretty good too, though Kurzel’s extremely muted colour schemes and distanced camera work don’t really do it any favours. But hey, it’s still better than a Michael Bay movie.