Adnerb the Movie Nerd

Movie reviews from a middle school teacher's perspective

Red Sparrow

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Do you get excited when you hear a movie is full of graphic and sadistic torture scenes?  Have you always wanted to see Jennifer Lawrence completely naked?  Do you look forward to  a movie with a terrible script?  If you answered ‘yes’ to each one of these questions, Red Sparrow is the movie for you.  Unfortunately, I answered ‘no’ and did not care for this movie.  The trailers make Red Sparrow sound like it will be an interesting, thoughtful movie.  If only the trailer writer could have written the script!  There are some very gruesome special effects to help explain why promising ballerina Dominika Egorova (Lawrence) is sent to Sparrow School, aka Whore University, by her sleazy uncle.  Sparrow school teaches you how to become detached from your emotions so that you can have sex as one of many methods of controlling or eliminating potential informants and enemies (the movie seems to focus mainly on the first method though).  The ultimate goal is  gain information for the Russian government.  It takes almost 2 1/2 hours to get to the minor plot twist pay-off.  This movie wastes some good actors, like Joel Edgerton, Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling, Mary-Louis Parker and Ciaran Hinds.  With this talent, I expected more, but got so much less!

The Justice League

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Batman and Wonder Woman band together in this movie to organize a group of super heroes to, you guessed it, save the world!  These DC super heroes are not as interesting as the Marvel ones.  There are several reasons for this.  First of all, the writing is kind of lackluster and doesn’t have the snap or pizzazz of the recent Thor movie or even Guardians of the Galaxy.  Next, this movie kind of jumps over the back stories for The Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg.  These characters could have been fleshed out more, especially since they didn’t get a prior movie to establish who they are and what they’re about. As someone who is totally unfamiliar with the comic books, I would have appreciated more back story for these characters instead of merely a sentence or two of exposition.   Last of all, killing Superman off and then bringing him back from the dead just seemed kind of dumb.  On the other hand, this is not a bad movie.  Aquaman, as played by Jason Momoa, is a hunk, and definitely not one of your cookie cutter hero types.  Ezra Miller makes a humorous and interesting, and even a bit endearing, Flash.  As she has previously demonstrated, Gal Gadot is great as Wonder Woman.  Ray Fisher as Cyborg didn’t get enough screen time for me to decide if I liked his performance (or his character).  I also felt Amy Adams was wasted as Lois Lane, but then, how much dialogue can you have between her and “zombie superman?”  (Even though he wasn’t really a zombie, just re-animated).  Jeremy Irons as Alfred handles his sardonic dialogue with a stiff British upper lip as he deadpans several references to Wonder Woman and Batman not taking the opportunity to romance it up a bit.  All in all, this is an enjoyable movie and I am sure you will be entertained.  However, if you only have time to see one super hero movie, you might be better off seeing Thor Ragnarok!