There is much to unpack with Francis Lawrence’s (
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, I Am Legend) ambitious spy thriller
Red Sparrow, a 2018 early summer release that mainly flew under the radar domestically ($46 million) but excelled internationally ($150 million). Jennifer Lawrence (
Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle) is, as of 2018, probably the actress who can command the most money per movie. If not number one, she’s pretty darn close. But that doesn’t mean that every movie she does will earn her an Oscar nomination or gross $100 million. And she’s not that choosy. Since bursting onto the scene with 2010’s
Winter’s Bone, the first of her four Oscar nominations and one of the best breakout performances in the last 25 years, Lawrence has starred in more than 15 movies before the release of
Red Sparrow. And while she can excel at portraying various characters, a Russian spy will not go down as one of her Top 10 performances of all time. It’s not that she was as bad as Dominika Egorova, a Russian ballet dancer who is, more or less, forced into the life of being an undercover operative after a terrible leg injury ruins her dancing career and leaves her needing money to pay for her mother’s medical expenses.
Continue reading Red Sparrow (2018) →
Mission Impossible: Fallout could be a template for creating action movies. This is everything you want in a pure action movie, offering the same suspense, mystery, and comedic tones you expect from this top-of-the-line franchise. Tom Cruise (Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men) reprises his most recognizable character (Top Gun came out over 30 years ago. Maverick is great, Ethan Hunt is the identifiable Cruise character, at least for anyone younger than 35). I’ve spent a good part of the last two decades knocking Tom Cruise for his choice of roles, wishing he would return to the types of roles that earned him three Academy Award nominations between 1990-2000. And honestly, at the time, I thought he was phoning it in for box office dollars. I understand an action flick here and there.
“The rush of battle is a potent and almost lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” – Chris Hedges, author of War Is A Force that Gives Us Meaning.
As my friend Tom would say, directing a Mission Impossible movie is like a doorknob. Everyone gets a turn. This is so true, but not really in a good way. While this franchise undoubtedly improves with each new installment, this wasn’t always the case. My biggest problem with the first four movies of the franchise was how different they were from one another. I have never watched a sequel that was so inherently different in directing, storytelling, cinematography, sound, and everything else from the original than Mission Impossible 2 was from Mission Impossible. John Woo’s Hong Kong-style martial arts action flick was so far completely different from the Brian DePalma intelligent, well-crafted, big-budget adaptation of the brilliant spy television series that ran for seven years in the late 1960s that it felt like the two movies weren’t even related. I don’t necessarily oppose changing a director (though I don’t love it), but I oppose changing styles. Plenty of franchises have had different directors that have made that work (most notably the James Bond franchise, which is similar to Mission Impossible), but many more haven’t.
Sicario: Day of the Soldado is not so much a sequel to 2015’s megahit