We went to see RED SPARROW as our date-day treat. There was nothing else we particularly fancied and we were near the reclining-seat cinemas so we thought 'why not'?
A ballerina with the Bolshoi with the oddly alluring name of 'Dominika' suffers a stomach churner of an injury that puts an end to her dancing days. She has a super-creepy uncle who explains that she will be kicked out of her Moscow-posh Bolshoi funded apartment. She lives with her sickly mother, and she, creepy uncle assures her, will be victim to health-care-for-the-uninsured. Must've been horrified intakes of breath in America. Or at least the parts of America that call themselves 'America'. Parts of America that call themselves 'Canada' would have been indifferent.
Creepy uncle blackmails her, and offers her a job as a sparrow. A sparrow is a secret agent who is trained to get under the guard of hapless Americans by rogering them. Dominika's secret rogering name might have been 'Stormy Daniels'. She is trained by Charlotte Rampling who reprises her 'Night Porter' role. Sort of. I think creepy uncle really just wanted to see her without any clothes on.
Stormy has a gift for rogering and is very convincing. She can also give a bloke a VERY bad time if she so chooses and she so-chooses for a fellow trainee who has a very miserable time of it indeed.
She's sent to Budapest to extract the name of a high-level mole from an American agent played by an Australian who also played an Egyptian. Why? Dunno. Although if those under MAGA hats are anything to go by, good-looking roosters are light on the ground in the US. As are teeth. As any devotee of spy fiction knows, moles are either traitorous dangers to the very fabric of the universe, or heroes. Depends on whether they are ours or theirs.
Now, we lived in Budapest for three years, so we spent a fair bit of the Budapest part of the movie whispering excitedly "Oooo; we've been there". I looked back longingly and wondered in the way of wonderings why I hadn't been subjected to a steamy Stormy adventure, and consoled myself by thinking maybe I had, but I was subjected to a memory-erasing drug and couldn't remember. Or I was pissed. In reality I just didn't know very much.
Anyway Stormy does what Stormy does with the American agent played by an Australian who also played an Egyptian in an attempt to get him to whisper the name of the mole so she can be a hero. She also does a lot of stuff that had us thinking "Hmmm, why is she doing that" and the same thoughts occurred to her bosses and suspicion falls upon her devotion to the cause and she goes back to Russia for a bit of torture.
She becomes the first Russian EVER to be released after a trip to the cells and heads back to the American agent played by an Australian who also played an Egyptian. She skins him.
She rings her boss with name of the mole, although the skinning bit is sort of peripheral to this. The rest of the movie is the ending-bit and I shan't go there.
Is it any good? Well yes it is. It has all the bits that make a good movie good. Uppances are come. There are bits that had us whispering 'well I didn't see that coming' and there are lots places where we have been. I would maybe have liked Champs Bar on Dohány ut to have featured but it wasn't and that's OK. I have been counselled about using maguffies (tee-hee) as a rating tool so I won't.
Heaps better'n we expected 7.5/10 from a hard marker
A ballerina with the Bolshoi with the oddly alluring name of 'Dominika' suffers a stomach churner of an injury that puts an end to her dancing days. She has a super-creepy uncle who explains that she will be kicked out of her Moscow-posh Bolshoi funded apartment. She lives with her sickly mother, and she, creepy uncle assures her, will be victim to health-care-for-the-uninsured. Must've been horrified intakes of breath in America. Or at least the parts of America that call themselves 'America'. Parts of America that call themselves 'Canada' would have been indifferent.
Creepy uncle blackmails her, and offers her a job as a sparrow. A sparrow is a secret agent who is trained to get under the guard of hapless Americans by rogering them. Dominika's secret rogering name might have been 'Stormy Daniels'. She is trained by Charlotte Rampling who reprises her 'Night Porter' role. Sort of. I think creepy uncle really just wanted to see her without any clothes on.
Stormy has a gift for rogering and is very convincing. She can also give a bloke a VERY bad time if she so chooses and she so-chooses for a fellow trainee who has a very miserable time of it indeed.
She's sent to Budapest to extract the name of a high-level mole from an American agent played by an Australian who also played an Egyptian. Why? Dunno. Although if those under MAGA hats are anything to go by, good-looking roosters are light on the ground in the US. As are teeth. As any devotee of spy fiction knows, moles are either traitorous dangers to the very fabric of the universe, or heroes. Depends on whether they are ours or theirs.
Now, we lived in Budapest for three years, so we spent a fair bit of the Budapest part of the movie whispering excitedly "Oooo; we've been there". I looked back longingly and wondered in the way of wonderings why I hadn't been subjected to a steamy Stormy adventure, and consoled myself by thinking maybe I had, but I was subjected to a memory-erasing drug and couldn't remember. Or I was pissed. In reality I just didn't know very much.
Anyway Stormy does what Stormy does with the American agent played by an Australian who also played an Egyptian in an attempt to get him to whisper the name of the mole so she can be a hero. She also does a lot of stuff that had us thinking "Hmmm, why is she doing that" and the same thoughts occurred to her bosses and suspicion falls upon her devotion to the cause and she goes back to Russia for a bit of torture.
She becomes the first Russian EVER to be released after a trip to the cells and heads back to the American agent played by an Australian who also played an Egyptian. She skins him.
She rings her boss with name of the mole, although the skinning bit is sort of peripheral to this. The rest of the movie is the ending-bit and I shan't go there.
Is it any good? Well yes it is. It has all the bits that make a good movie good. Uppances are come. There are bits that had us whispering 'well I didn't see that coming' and there are lots places where we have been. I would maybe have liked Champs Bar on Dohány ut to have featured but it wasn't and that's OK. I have been counselled about using maguffies (tee-hee) as a rating tool so I won't.
Heaps better'n we expected 7.5/10 from a hard marker