Jennifer Lawrence needs a new agent. Actually, Jennifer Lawrence needs to star in a good movie again. Red Sparrow is not it.

She affects a Russian accent in this one, playing Domenika Egorova, apparently the prima ballerina for the Bolshoi company, who becomes a spy. I don’t particularly like ballet, and I don’t really follow it at all, but I happen to know the current Bolshoi prima is Anastasia Goryacheva; it’s a high-profile job. Seems to me a rather unlikely career path. Anyway, Domenika is clobbered in a clumsy fall by her dance partner, in a scene that was honestly sickening, like watching Gordon Hayward’s injury early this NBA season. She’s lying there on the theater floor and her leg is jutting off in a direction legs aren’t supposed to go, and then she wakes up in a hospital bed, and she realizes, and we realize, she will never dance again.

Ah, but, her uncle Vanya (no kidding, she has an uncle Vanya, played by Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts) is a top Russian government security spy chief type guy, and he knows things. Like the dance partner who injured her did it on purpose, so his girlfriend could become the new prima. And so she takes her crutch and beats the crap out of both dancer and girlfriend, leaves  them bleeding and unconscious, then has a crisis of conscience and calls the Russian version of 9-1-1, to get them medical attention.

And that, right there, is the key to Domenika as a dramatic character. She’s capable of absorbing and overcoming massive amounts of physical pain and terrible injuries. She’s nice; she wants to be a good person. But maybe not all that good. Cross her, and she will mess you up. Plus her uncle Vanya (snort) has her back, and knows things, but is also kind of a horrible person.

And that’s the entire movie. Trailers have focused on her training as a Sparrow, a kind of spy-seductress, carefully trained in the art of sexual ingratiation. Run by a splendidly cold-blooded Matron (Charlotte Rampling). But in fact, the training scenes don’t take up much of the movie. Uncle Vanya has a job for her. He wants her to seduce an American spy, Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), who is the minder for a Russian double-agent, and who messed up badly enough to be pulled out of Russia by the CIA. But the double-agent won’t work with anyone else, and so Nate’s been reinstated. She’s to ‘get close to him,’ and see if she can find out who the double-agent is. Meanwhile, she has an agenda of her own. She wants out–doesn’t find the job of Sparrow congenial, apparently, on account of the prostitution part of it–but has to protect her dear old crippled Mum, who relies on the good offices of Uncle Vanya for her flat and medical treatments. So Nate thinks she’s recruitable, and offers her asylum in America in exchange for some spying, and she’s playing angles of her own.

So we have the makings of a good John Le Carrè-type spy thriller. But without Le Carrè’s careful plotting and deeply abiding cynicism. I felt like I was always four steps ahead of the movie, and essentially nothing that happened surprised me, except for the ending, which didn’t surprise me at all, but was also surpassingly dumb. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but Nate went from a plausibly effective spy to a really foolish one. But that’s not the real problem.

The other characters in the movie regard Domenika with some admiration for her intelligence and insight into other people (well, men). I have no idea where they’re coming from. She never seems particularly brilliant or insightful. She turns the tables on the Russkis, not by outsmarting them, but through her sheer capacity to withstand physical pain. She’s brutally tortured, again and again she’s tortured, and she’s able to withstand it. This enables her to persuade them that she’s on the up-and-up.  She suffers, and because of her suffering, she’s redeemed, sort of.

It made for a movie that I found actively unpleasant to watch. I’m not opposed to violent imagery in films, and I’m not opposed to torture scenes per se, though I don’t much like them. But sometimes they can work effectively in advancing the story. But this is a movie about a young woman who is just battered, again and again, and wins by taking it. Maybe that happens, and, my gosh, I suppose a ballerina would have an amazing capacity for pain, but there is a point at which movies need to, you know, entertain, at least at some level. By the end, I managed a grudging admiration for Lawrence’s performance; there’s never been any doubt about her skill as an actress. But I found the movie profoundly dispiriting.

I think I know what they’re trying to do. I think they’re trying to approximate the extraordinary nihilism and violence and misogyny of Putin’s Russia. We Americans want to normalize Putin, want to see him as a legitimate world leader, somewhat unsavory perhaps but someone we need to work with. He’s not. He’s a thug, and his so-called government is a conspiracy of thieves and thugs and kleptocrats, leavened, if at all, by the great Russian talent for stultifying bureaucracy. What this movie leaves out is the absurdity of it all, the despairing surrealism. And so we’re left with a star vehicle movie, featuring a fine performance by its star, but a movie that doesn’t illuminate anything, doesn’t provide new insight into anything, a cold war thriller for a post-cold-war world. It’s a movie about beating up women. I had as unenjoyable a two hours as i have ever spent in a movie theater. Seriously, J-Law, get a new agent.