YMMV / Red Sparrow

The novel:

• Friendly Fandoms: With Black Widow, due to the characters' similar backstories and even color and animal-based names.

The film:

• Applicability: The film's focus on sexual violence against women is all the more poignant given that it came out mere months after the rise of the #MeToo movement. Unfortunately, it has mostly been received as taking the wrong stance on the issue, propagating the elements that #MeToo is working to remove by glorifying the sexual violence and because the women in the film have questionable, if any, agency. The movie also strongly suggests that the only way women can achieve any form of strength or agency is through being violated.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: Jennifer Lawrence is sexually assaulted, goes to whore school, gets sexually assaulted some more, and there is also quite a bit of torture. On Midnight Screenings, Brad Jones says the movie basically "Trojan Horses the audience" into seeing an Exploitation Film with trailers focusing on the espionage, only for there to be so much objectionable content.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: A particularly odd example, to the point it can be seen as a Deconstruction of this concept. On one hand, it’s known as that movie where Jennifer Lawrence finally strips naked on camera. On the other hand, nearly all of those scenes are only Fanservice out of context considering the movie’s heavy themes of sexual violence and exploitation, which garnered tons of criticism. As a result, the movie is arguably more well-known for the criticisms surrounding the fanservice rather than the fanservice itself.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Mary-Louise Parker's alcoholic American is for many the best part of the movie.
• Fetish Retardant: The film is so heavily exploitative of women that all the supposedly sexy shots of Jennifer Lawrence either nude, semi-nude or in revealing outfits just comes off as unsettling.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Months after this movie came out, Maria Butina, a red-headed Russian spy, was caught attempting to undermine the US using "sex, lies and guns". The parallel is eerie.
• Narm:
  • The Russian accents are pretty laughable across the board.
  • The line "You sent me to whore school." Delivered with a poor Russian accent to boot.
  • Even with the charitable interpretation that it is a fake name, "Nate Nash" has made a lot of people roll their eyes and laugh.
• Older Than They Think: General Korchnoi becoming an American mole due to his wife dying as a result of Russian bureaucracy mirrors the fate of Captain Marko Ramius's wife in The Hunt for Red October.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Overlapping with Friendly Fandoms above, the movie is considered by many critics to be "the unofficial Black Widow movie" before Marvel Studios would eventually come to make it themselves a few years later.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus of the film's critical reception.
• Uncertain Audience: A common criticism laid at its feet is that it didn't know to whom it was targeted. It was too serious for people who like campy films in the genre and too campy for people who prefer a more typical spy film.

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