Red Sparrow Is a Shockingly Brutal Espionage

Jennifer Lawrence’s newest starrer movie is a master of seductive and manipulative combat.

The movie is based on a 2013 novel by Jason Matthews, an ex-CIA operative who reportedly brought much of his expertise to a story of two secret agents, one Russian and one American, navigating intricate surveillance missions around the world in a game of one-upmanship. I’ll wager that whatever realism may have been present in Matthews’s book has been mostly stripped out by Justin Haythe’s script, which focuses less on the gritty details of espionage and more on the various crimes visited upon the body and soul of Dominika Egorova (Lawrence), the film’s protagonist.

When she suffers a career-ending injury, Dominika and her mother are facing a bleak and uncertain future. That is why she finds herself manipulated into becoming the newest recruit for Sparrow School, a secret intelligence service that trains exceptional young people like her to use their bodies and minds as weapons. After enduring the perverse and sadistic training process, she emerges as the most dangerous Sparrow the program has ever produced. Dominika must now reconcile the person she was with the power she now commands, with her own life and everyone she cares about at risk, including an American CIA agent who tries to convince her he is the only person she can trust.