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 babysitter is a 2017 comedy-horror film directed by McG and written by Brian Duffield. It stars Samara Weaving and Judah Lewis. He plays an unpopular twelve year old named Cole (the only one his age who still has a babysitter, played by Samara Weaving.) She's incredibly attractive and Cole is very attracted to her. The problem is, it turns out she runs a satanic cult and takes some of his blood every time he goes to sleep, and uses it to make her (and her friends) wishes come true.
I haven't been a fan of McG in the past, but I was actually looking forward to this one quite a bit. Whenever a director I haven't been fond of in the past brings out a film that looks interesting, I go into it with an open mind. On the plus side, The Babysitter is better than most of McG's previous films. On the negative side, he hasn't set the bar very high in the past, and here he only sets it slightly higher. This film is rated 15. It is very much a film for teenagers, and that does not work in The Babysitter's favour.
There's a moment in this film where (for a reason that, at the time, was completely lost on me) the titular babysitter and a group of her friends play spin the dare and she has to kiss all of the other people who are taking part in the game. She gives all the men fairly chaste kisses, but then she gets to the first woman and we see the kiss in great and incredibly eroticised detail. Now, I realise that the only reason it's in the film is so that teenage boys will tell their friends about the scene and make them interested it. Not only does the film take an incredibly cynical view of teenagers and why they watch films, it's also incredibly sexist.
Fortunately, that stuff ends there, but then all of the other problems come in. I laughed once in The Babysitter, but pretty much every joke in this film falls so flat. I don't understand how a film with a set-up like this can feel so dull, but it does. There's a lot of gore and nastiness in this film, but strangely none of it feels that visceral.
This isn't one of the worst horrors I've ever seen by any means, but it is definitely one of the worst of the year. The Babysitter feels strangely sleazy and it's also incredibly unfunny. If you want to put something on as a distraction in the background at a party, or when you're hanging about with friends it might be okay for that, because you can casually pay attention to it and feel like you haven't missed out on anything - but that's the best I can say about this.
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