Wow. You seldom see quite this level of sandbox-war... throwing 1s and 10s at each other like brats playing cops 'n' robbers. (Not that kids today do such ancient things... But if they did, the Russians would be the robbers, for sure... )

I seldom have the patience to review movies that already have tons of reviews, but I'm just so annoyed with the ridiculous rating war that I had to add a leveled one to the few existing...

It's a mediocre, stereotypical Americans-vs.-Russians-flick, not great and not awful. Average stuff - but executed decently enough to make it a tad better than the usual 5/10 standard movie version of a tv-dinner.

I expected to hate the flick. I read a bunch of the reviews and as usual didn't quite believe the positive ones since the negative ones were the verbally most eloquent ones. I sure didn't like it at first, but it mellowed out into a mild interest for finding out who killed General Mustard in the Dining Room. (No, that wasn't a spoiler, in case you've never been into classic boardgames) and in the end I felt that it was a decent enough watch for me to not want to throw the screen out of the window. IF having an objective view. Which I can clearly see in many reviews that most - haters AND lovers - DON'T.

I didn't particularly like it, but I didn't hate it either. Imdb'rs should grow up and stop dropping extreme ratings all over the place, it's so tiresome. There has been very few movies made that could deserve an actual 1/10. This is not one of them. And for the opposite end of the scale; the 10s should be reserved for movies that have a lot - a LOT - more than this one has. I do agree with most of the negative opinions, but not to the extent they seem to get enraged and personally offensed by this movie.

I can't be bothered to write any passionate rants about pluses and minuses, so I'll keep it breaf.

Acting; Half a point for the haters. The acting is pretty bad. But not THAT bad. Acceptable. Lawrence just isn't an amazing character actor, and will never be, but she did a fair job with what she had to work with. (Except the accent. God, Hollywood... please... ditch the fake accents... EVERYONE hates them... If you won't do it in Russian, just have them speak English normally...)

Plot; Standard set menu meal, paint-by-numbers spy flick. No surprises. Except the hardcore school-that-teaches-their-students-how-to-use-their-bodies. (Imdb apparently doesn't allow me to write the most common word for a "worker" of that "trade". Seriously? Imdb? Really?) Not hardcore as in especially graphic, but that ice cold training of humans to be walking, talking, spying sex tools. (Was that profane or offensive too, Imdb?) Haven't really seen it portrayed quite that as-a-matter-of-factly before. Some unpleasant scenes but they just weren't emotional enough to make me feel all that bothered by them. And that's a BAD thing when those scenes are about torture, rape and abuse in the name of schooling. Then they didn't get through.

My biggest issue; The usual one... "Russians are evil, Americans are nice guys. Hooray." Sigh... I'm neither Russian nor American. (Thank God...) Maybe that's why I'm actually allowed to take part of what's going on in the world on an objective basis rather than through patriotic, deceptive, polished, distorted (choose one or all) channels nor by having inherited societal xenophobic, ignorant preconceptions and biases towards whole countries, their people and their cultures. You know what? There are no good guys nor bad guys. Both countries are currently governed by men that could probably get on paper that they actually suffer from psychopathy, who both have hubris that by far supercedes the original namesake's... Absolute objectivity isn't necessary. But this kind of crucifixion vs. sainthood - is just ridiculous. Especially when it's so conceited as to blatantly serve it in weird pieces of dialogue or shove that awkward social critique towards Russia's persecution of LGBTQ people (which I'm a very harsh critic of) into one of those "school"-classes, It just felt so contrived, no matter the importance (and truth) of the topic.

I'm much more likely to rewatch some South Korean spy flicks than this one. They usually don't resort to pure propaganda wars in their spy movies.

If you, as a watcher, have some brains and insight and can try to separate the annoying parts from the actual movie in itself, it can give you a couple of hours of not-very-intellectual entertainment. And you'll forget it as quickly.

It's just one of those movies; "Didn't completely blow but didn't quite get me hyped up either".Mediocre, standard, run-of-the-mill. Just that it had a lot more propaganda.

PS; Imdb, seriously? I get a warning for my text containing profanity/offensive words, for including the most common word for "the working girl"? Are people not allowed to mention nor even pretend the "trade" actually exists...? Lol... What word would you prefer? Or is it that I had a hypothesis about the mental status of two world leaders? Is that profanity? Perhaps offensive? *Can't stop laughing* I won't edit anymore. That would be restriction of human rights. Let's see how your moral censorship deems my "profanity".