Cinematic violence isn’t immoral, or degrading, or anything of the things it gets called by the naysayers who make up the bulk of mainstream critics these days. It’s a tool, nothing more, nothing less – as starkly utilitarian as a colour palette, or the use of a zoom. Indeed, it’s only problematic when it’s being used for the wrong reasons: to manipulate, or to glorify. So, when confronted with scenes of torture or bloodshed or distress, it helps to ask oneself why a filmmaker has chosen to use violence – to examine, carefully, and without hyperbole, their endgame.
Red Sparrow isn’t a bad film because it’s violent and gratuitous, though it is both of those things.
In the case of Red Sparrow, a new Jennifer Lawrence vehicle helmed by the determinedly pedestrian Francis Lawrence (he of Constantine and Hunger Games fame; also, no relation), that endgame is made explicitly clear by the time the first explosion of mutilation rolls around, roughly 20 minutes in. The steely-eyed Dominika Egorova (Lawrence), a ballerina turned assassin-cum-seducer, has an opportunity to hurt those who have engineered the accident that made her pack in her promising dance career. And she takes it, without batting an eyelid and without mercy, brutally beating her tormentors while they’re locked in carnal embrace, Lawrence the director’s camera scooping close-ups off the battered flesh.
The message is clear: this is not your average Jennifer Lawrence blockbuster. The Lawrences, finally freed from the firmly PG-13 shackles of the young adult film franchise that made their names, is clearly trying to serve up some very adult, Paul Verhoeven-esque entertainment: Red Sparrow skimps neither on sex (in one scene, a naked Dominika is forced to offer herself up to the man who assaulted her in front of a class of her fellow assassins), nor on violence (there are two, count ’em two, lengthy and extreme torture scenes), nor on sexual violence (rapes abound).
But underneath all of that fire and fury, the two Lawrences seem to have forgotten to substitute in anything of real value. Stripped of its cruel and adolescent violence, Red Sparrow is shockingly ho-hum: a derivative, John LeCarre on crack spygame that will have viewers accustomed to the genre sighing the story beats as they happen. It doesn’t help either that the film is some two and a half hours in length, and that its twist drops with all the weight of a boulder in a lake.
No. Red Sparrow isn’t a bad film because it’s violent and gratuitous, though it is both of those things. It’s a bad film because it’s violent for the sake of being violent – the cinematic equivalent of a jackass putting a staple through their nipple so they might relish in the horrified gasps.
Red Sparrow is in Australian cinemas this Thursday March 1.
