The spy genre is the most fun to watch and to make. It allows for creative twists and turns and opportunities to create incredibly tense moments out of seemingly simple situations. It's one of the few genres where ambiguity can be used to significant effects. However, too much uncertainty can make even the best looking spy movies feel empty and not as fully textured as the filmmakers might otherwise think. This is especially true of the main character in any given story. You can have a protagonist who is mysterious, but there still needs to be some kind of understanding of the characters motivations and inner feelings. Otherwise, you wind up with a story that seems to prefer showing painful moments with no subtext, thus robbing said moment of any real human connection, and not providing any actual satisfactory pay off to the characters journey. While this movie is not entirely devoid of said texture, it sadly has so little of it that it might as well not have it at all.
Based on the book of the same title by Jason Matthews, the story follows a young Russian Ballerina named Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence), who loses her dancing career after a debilitating accident. Seeking a new means to support her ailing mother, she turns to her Uncle, Vanya Egorov (Matthias Schoenaerts), who works for the Russian government. Vanya provides Dominika with a simple job that quickly becomes more horrid than predicted, making Dominika witness to a political murder. She is then given two choices: death or become a Sparrow, a particular type of secret agent. Choosing the later, Dominika is trained in the art of seduction and is expected to surrender her body to the state to extract information from any given subject. After a harsh training program, she is given her first assignment: to approach, seduce, and entrap an American CIA agent named Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), who is suspected of working with a mole in the Russian government. From then on, the story becomes a game of spy vs. spy as all parties do their best to outsmart each other and survive.
The most significant issue I have with this film is the lack of texture for the main character. Dominika's primary motivation is to take care of her mother, which is fine as that does make her sympathetic. Apart from that, I couldn't tell you anything else about her character, because the movie apparently couldn't be bothered to tell me anything about her. We never learn anything about her history, we never get any insight as to what kind of person she really is, and we never get any real sense of growth from her as a character. Everything she does in the film does build up to rich pay off at the very end of the story, but it doesn't really have any impact because there's no real emotional weight to the surprise. Not to mention that the ending twist, while mostly satisfactory, is so cliche and so underwhelming, primarily due to the lack of texture, that I wasn't as pleased with it as I might have otherwise wanted to be.
On the plus side of things, everyone's acting is excellent and spot-on. Jennifer Lawrence, despite not having much of a character to work with, still delivers a professional performance. She and Joel Edgerton seem to have good chemistry and work off each other very well. The cinematography is appropriately dark and gritty, the production design is stark and elegant, and the musical score is some of James Newton Howard's best work. Also, despite the films pacing moving slower than I think it should, the story is ultimately clever and does provide some satisfactory spy action. It could have used some more, but at least it's there.
While this is not an awful spy movie, it doesn't really bring anything interesting to the table, and what it does deliver is flat, overdone, and ultimately forgettable. As mentioned before, there is a satisfactory twist at the end, but you have to slog through a lot of drabness to get there. There are lots of better spy movies out there, so I would honestly recommend you watch one of those instead. If you need an excellent Jennifer Lawrence movie, watch X-Men: First Class. If you need a unique Joel Edgerton movie, try The Gift, It is insanely good.
Is this movie worth seeing?
No.
Is it worth seeing in theaters?
No.
Why?
It spends too much time looking at ugly aspects of inhumanity that it forgets to have anything to say about it. Also, it's a poor excuse for a spy movie.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am TheNorm, thank you for reading.
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