A Russian ballet dancer finds her career ended after injury, and unable to look after her mother in their Bolshoi-funded apartment, goes to her intelligence-officer uncle for help. He involves her in a mission to investigate a colleague, but after that mission doesn't go as expected, she gets sent to a school to learn more about the arts of seduction and manipulation, and eventually out into the field to seduce a top American agent to reveal a traitor at the heart of the russian government.
If that sounds like a Cold War era relic, congratulations, that's exactly the vibe this film has. Except it's clearly meant to be set during the modern world, judging by the mobile phones being used by everybody. And yes, countries still investigate each other and play spy games even now, but still...
This is a real misstep for Jennifer Lawrence - her character has none of the everywoman personality that epitomized Katniss in the Hunger games and most of her best roles (even her character in "Mother!" is the everyday-woman forming the befuddled centre of the overwhelming weirdness). Early events that are presumably meant to prove, despite upcoming events, that she is a strong woman just makes her seem mildly psychotic. And the film is punishingly long at 140 minutes for what is, in the end, the same old spy games with a not particularly fresh lick of paint. Joel Edgerton continues his run of ending up in kinda lousy films. There's an interesting five minute stretch of Mary Louise Parker as a drunken American secretary, but this is mostly a messy slog of a film.
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