RED SPARROW

Name: RED SPARROW
Item: RED SPARROW
Author: Stephanie Mott

"An Excruciating Two and Half Hours"

Content: -3 Excessive sex, violence, immorality, and/or worldview problems. (Sometimes excessive content such as violence is in otherwise redemptive movies.)

Entertainment Quality:

	None	Light	Moderate	Heavy
Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

Credits →

What You Need To Know:

RED SPARROW is a spy thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence with unpredictable twists and turns, but makes the audience sit through the worst slime to get there. Lawrence plays Dominika, a Russian ballet dancer who breaks her leg and is forced to go to a spy school that trains men and women in sexual manipulation for the communist government. She excels and is given an assignment to seduce a CIA operative named Nate, who has a high-ranking contact in the Soviet government. However, the CIA operative knows who Dominika is as well, so it becomes a back and forth between who is using her to get what they want. What Nate and Dominika don’t anticipate is that they fall in love.

RED SPARROW has a great cast and a surprising twist ending. The cast is terrific, and there are positive messages extolling the individual freedom Americans get and the importance of treating people well. However, to get to any redeeming aspects, viewers must slog through nauseating violence, including terribly graphic sexual violence. RED SPARROW is an excessive, unacceptable movie people should avoid.

Content:

(B, C, PP, ACAC, Ho, LLL, VVV, SSS, NNN, A, D, MM)

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Light positive moral worldview rebuking the idea that women should let anyone use their body to manipulate others, positive portrayal of a character who cares for individuals that others may find expendable, man says “Thanks God,” woman wears a cross necklace, plus strong Pro-American, patriotic, anti-communist content portraying the USA’s individual freedom as positive in contrast to Communist Russia and some homosexual references;

Foul Language:

23 obscenities (mostly f-words), three profanities (including one strong use of Jesus’s name), vomiting;

Violence:

Very strong grotesque violence, within a few minutes of the movie, a dancer’s leg is severely broken and surgery is performed on it, a naked man and women are beat brutally in the shower with a cane, woman’s jaw is broken, a man is strangled with a wire, woman beats man with a broken off shower knob, a mutilated dead body is in a bathtub, woman is tortured and hit in the face and head with a club, man is tortured with a skin graft, a fight scene includes people getting sliced and stabbed many times with a knife, woman is run over by a truck, men are shot in the head;

Sex:

Very strong graphic sex, a man and woman have depicted sex in a shower, a man rapes a woman in a hotel room, spies watch pornography in their training, a woman is nearly forced to perform oral sex on a homosexual man, a man tries to rape a woman in a shower but ends up getting beaten, a woman gropes a man over his pants, it’s implied that a woman is pleasuring another man with her hands off screen, depicted sex between man and woman clothed in their underwear, lewd reference, and discussion of a man’s homosexuality;

Nudity:

Multiple instances of full female and male nudity in sexual and non-sexual situations, men and women in their underwear, scene in a strip club shows scantily clad female strippers;

Alcohol Use:

Light drinking throughout;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

Smoking tobacco but no drug content; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

Strong miscellaneous immorality because deception and lying are integral parts of the story.

More Detail:

RED SPARROW is a spy thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence that has its unpredictable twists and turns, but makes the audience sit through the worst slime to get there.

The beginning sequence introduces Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence), a very talented Russian ballerina who lives with her sickly mother and Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), a CIA operative in Moscow trying to receive intel from a secret contact in the Russian government. In this opening montage, however, Nate and his contact are nearly discovered by the police, and he must retreat to the American embassy. Meanwhile, in the middle of Dominika’s performance, a fellow dancer “accidentally” jumps on her leg, breaking it badly.

Dominika’s leg is so badly damaged, her career is certainly over. The movie reveals Dominika’s capacity for violence when she discovers her fellow performer broke her leg on purpose because he’s in love with the dancer that would take Dominika’s place. She responds by violently beating the two dancers with her cane in a shower.

Her uncle, Ivan Egorov, who works for the SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service), manipulates Dominika to help him on an operation where all she’ll have to do is sleep with the target and replace his phone with a fake one. Not really having a choice, she agrees, but the operation turns into an assassination, with the target being strangled.

Because Dominika was a witness to an assassination, she’s a loose end. However, her uncle allows her to live if she agrees to go to a Sparrow School, which trains men and women in sexual manipulation to seduce the enemy to get intel from other countries.

The school turns out to be rather brutal. If you fail, you are killed. To succeed, you must completely give your body over to the state. Dominika, however, is stubborn and refuses to give herself sexually to the men who try to force her. Despite this, her cunning ability to read people advances her, and she’s given an assignment by her uncle.

The CIA operative Nate Nash is in Budapest. Dominika is ordered to get close to him, seduce him and find out who the Russian mole is. Dominika obeys her orders and gets close to Nate, but Nate immediately finds out who she is. So, he convinces his superiors to let him try to flip Dominika to their side.

Dominika and Nate get close, but not in a traditional romantic way, more in an ability to trust each other. Dominika just wants to protect her mother, and Nate wants to protect his secret contact’s life and identity and Dominika’s life.

However, the superiors grow more impatient and the Russians need the mole’s identity. So, the stakes are raised, but who’s really trustworthy and who isn’t?

RED SPARROW has a great cast. Jennifer Lawrence’s Russian accent is a bit distracting at first, but once you get used to it, she turns out to be the perfect actress for the role. Matthias Schoenaerts and Jeremy Irons make terrific Russian villains. The romantic relationship between Dominika and Nate, however, is a bit stretched, and it’s hard to see why either of the two like each other, other than their physical attractiveness. The movie takes its sweet time building the suspense, but the twist ending doesn’t disappoint. However, because the romantic relationship is weak, there’s an emotional resonance missing to the movie.

Surprisingly, there’s some positive moral messages in RED SPARROW. First, Nate genuinely cares for his informants and contacts. Also, America is shown in a pretty positive light when compared to the grotesque measures the Soviet government takes. The Russian mole in the movie praises America’s individual freedom and abhors what Russia has become. Finally, Dominika won’t give herself sexually as a way to manipulate targets. While many spy thrillers will conjure up provocative sexual situations with its female leads or co-leads, Dominika has a bit more self-respect. That said, the movie is still chalk full of sexual content and brief excessive nudity.

The biggest and most unforgivable problem in RED SPARROW is the movie’s grotesque violence, including the sexual violence viewers have to endure to get to the ending. The violence is nauseating, with multiple torture scenes that are excruciating to watch. Even more abhorrent is the movie’s wicked depiction of sexual violence, which crosses many lines. The sexual violence includes a rape scene, a woman nearly being forced to perform oral sex on a homosexual man and another attempted rape scene. Two depicted consensual sex scenes complete the loathsome content. Add to the fact that there’s two depicted consensual sex scenes, RED SPARROW Thus, even with some positive messages, RED SPARROW is an excessive, unacceptable movie that all moviegoers should avoid.