[Watch It or Not?] RED SPARROW (2018) Movie Review

Okay, admittedly, I don't want to watch this flick in the first place. I despise Jeniffer Lawrence for getting the Oscar for her average leading role on SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (2012). But what gives, my wife set an eye on this when she first saw the trailer. So there I was, sitting in the dark with nothing to expect but 2-hour of visual torture.

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RED SPARROW is about a girl, Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence), who is a nationally-renown ballerina. Her world starts to turn upside down the day he encountered Dmitri Ustinov (Kristof Konrad), a powerful politician who's being targeted by the Russian government. Her uncle, a high-rank official, don't wait a moment to seize the opportunity by including her in his evil "patriotic" plot against Ustinov.

This selfish uncle doesn't only set Dominika up to being raped by Ustinov, he also plans to use her sex appeal as a "weapon" to eliminate his future targets. He then sends Dominika to a "Sparrow School", where male and female cadets are trained to seduce and extract super-secret information from their targets.

============== SPOILER ENDS ==============

As I went in the plex with a severe sleepiness, lacking sleeps a couple nights in a row, I told my wife first hand that I'm probably going to fall asleep and when I do, please don't bother to wake me up. To my surprise, not only the movie was so tense from the very beginning, busted away my drowsiness way better than caffeine ever done; but also I'm growing so much affection in it that I scored it 9/10 in my book when the play was over.

The overall plot was so great (even "great" was an understatement). You can keep guessing how the story would progress, but 99 out of 100 chances are you would be so damn wrong. I can't remember when's the last time I enjoy this kind of thrill watching a movie, but Catch Me If You Can (2002) or the more recent one, Murder on the Orient Express (2017) will give you a general idea of the epic story writing.

The development of the characters were also far from flaws. Jennifer Lawrence executed her role perfectly and as is Joel Edgerton as an intuitive CIA agent. And I really can't blame the country I watched it in (Indonesia) for censoring so many scenes of nudity and sexually explicit content. I know they're there not for alluring the mass into buying the tickets, like what the majority of shameless local filcks do, but, professionally, to just getting in line with the story itself.

If you can only watch ONE movie this week, make sure it's RED SPARROW. I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

Score: 9/10. A must-watch!