Red Sparrow is a 2018 spy-thriller film directed by Francis Lawrence who worked with Jennifer Lawrence (the star here) on a couple of the Hunger Games movies, but this is a very different beast. Jennifer Lawrence plays Dominika Egorova (in, it has to be said, a not entirely convincing Russian accent), and Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenarts and Charlotte Rampling star as the film's secondary characters. This one is a pretty big departure from what Lawrence has done in the past, although it has to be said that she's making some pretty bold career choices. I'm not the first one to say that, and for a good reason: it's true. After last year's Mother! it appeared as if she was trying purposefully trying to appear in more "mature" films, and believe me, it doesn't get much more mature than Red Sparrow. The film plays out like one of those schlocky exploitation from the seventies, in that there's sexual violence, sex, violence, torture, and all manner o...
The Villainess is a 2017 revenge-thriller film starring Kim Ok-bin as Sook-hee and Shin Ha-Kyun as Lee Joong-Sang. It was directed by Jung Byung-Gil. Sook-he was trained as a child to be an assassin; however, when her mentor is killed, she's given a chance to escape imprisonment and redeem herself by being a government sleeper agent for ten years. However, when she discovers secrets about her past, she takes it upon herself to get revenge.
There's no question that The Villainess is a film made for fans of the action and revenge thriller genres. What separates this film from more conventional films (or films which only have great action scenes, like The Raid 1&2), is the fact that the film is genre-spliced in its own way. It's mostly a revenge thriller, but there are also elements of romantic comedy and romantic drama. As the film progresses, you start to care about Sook-hee, partly because of Kim's great performance and partly because of the brilliant script.
Although the film is surprisingly low on action scenes, the ones that are in it are excellently filmed and choreographed, and incredibly tense. They're made more so because you're invested in the characters, and that's where this film succeeds and others fail. There's very little sense in threatening a protagonist with any danger or violence if there's nothing to make the audience invested in them, but the fact that the story is so compelling means the film merits multiple viewings.
My only gripe with the film is that the way the narrative unfolds is a little confusing at times. Sometimes, there's very little to help the audience discern between present time and the past, and that makes it difficult to tell who is who, but it's not so confusing that you can't tell what the story is as the film reaches its conclusion. The fact that everything else about the film works so well makes it much easier to forgive.
Overall, the film is definitely worth a watch, and other than the obvious ones (Oldboy, Kill Bill, and so on) this would be a pretty good introduction to what the revenge thriller genre has to offer.
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