An excuse for Jennifer Lawrence to take off her clothes

Director Francis Lawrence and actress Jennifer Lawrence reunite after their lucrative collaboration on 'The Hunger Games' in a story of espionage and sex.

'Red Sparrow' is being promoted as a virguería in the line of 'Atomica', but in reality the film intends to function more as a tribute to those espionage 'thrillers' of the seventies full of shots of cryptic meetings and people who walks and smokes a lot. It hardly includes any action choreography, and makes a good part of its capacity for suspense fall on the questionable motivations that its protagonist suggests as he alternatively approaches Putin's intelligence services and the CIA, and travels between Budapest and London and different parts of the world. From Russia.

But at the same time it offers us scenes of attempted rapes, and people fighting naked in the showers and other signs of excessive violence; and, as it moves between torture chambers and opera houses, and scene by scene gives Jennifer Lawrence the opportunity to show off her colorful wardrobe, 'Red Sparrow' flaunts an excessive aesthetic that underlines the ridiculous tone of the story . The result is a film situated in no man's land between airport bestsellers and John le Carré intrigues, which, yes, lacks the disturbing worldview of the latter in part because it is as unbelievable as its heroine.

It's about Dominika (Lawrence), whose promising career as a dancer is cut short by a terrible injury and, desperate to find another way to support her sick mother, because of the manipulations of her mysterious uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts). )—yes, his name is Uncle Vanya—ends up as part of a secret training program for elite spies. There they will teach her to use her body as a lethal weapon without expressing any emotion in the process; She will be turned into something like a postmodern version of Mata Hari, an agent expert in the use of the art of seduction to obtain information.