How makers of spy films must miss the Cold War. Since it's clearly too difficult to sell the indecipherable threat of China as the foremost rival to America in the modern espionage world and the Muslim terrorist groups lack regimented global reach, it becomes necessary to turn again and again to Russia as the sinister ideological nemesis. Doubtless Russia in its current form is a corrupt force for evil, as evidenced by any amount of recent news, but depicting its apparatus as merely a continuation of the Soviet KGB-led system, as here, is an unhelpful oversimplification and just leads to a recycling of the established tropes of the genre. Hence, Jennifer Lawrence starts out as a ballerina for the Bolshoi, is coerced into being trained into a dehumanised honey trap-come-superspy to root out a mole and then goes through a cycle of being suspected by both sides and sexually humiliated while trying to play her spy masters and the Americans off against each other. Lawrence is fine, but doesn't get much to do besides show a lot of skin and act hard. Meanwhile, a host of British acting stalwarts such as Jeremy Irons and Charlotte Rampling are used just to add their trademark opaque gravitas as her calculating bosses.
The film has been criticised for both sexism and extreme violence, but these aren't really the problem, since it's quite plausible that the world she moves in is still that crude and brutal. The bigger problem is the muddle that the plot gets into with its double-dealings and fuzzy character motivations, including a U.S. official who we're led to believe is prepared to sell top-level military secrets for an Austin Powersesque $250,000. The sheer lack of focus and realism ends up detracting quite badly from the tension that it seeks to build up.
5/10
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