What an over-bloated, over-long waste of time. I had pretty low expectations going into this, yet it didn't even manage to meet those.

At a time when gripping real-life espionage stories are flowing at an ever increasing rate, they still somehow managed to make this an uninspired, uninteresting bore.

It felt like Jennifer Lawrence was trying to do nudity on her own, more empowering terms, following being a victim in the unfortunate 2014 iCloud photo leak. 'Red Sparrow' no doubt set out to be somewhat empowering for women, with its strong lead character, but it was woefully misguided in execution, and came across just plain sadistic.

I struggled to follow it at times, with the plot weaving into a confusing mess in the latter half. Struggled to want to follow it also, as by that point I just wanted all the characters sent to a gulag. Or was that a different era to this setting? I'm not even sure, because the time period was confusing too.

It was clear this was a film about Russians made by Americans - with horrendous accents and one or two lines of Russian dialogue all film. I love Russia, the cold war, espionage and spy thrillers - yet hated this with a passion.

One of the CIA guys said it best during final scenes; "What the hell is going on?"