Anna (2019)
Directed by Luc Besson
Beneath Anna Poliatova's striking beauty lies a secret that will unleash her indelible strength and skill to become one of the world's most feared government assassins.
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And Besson, who — like Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, the man responsible for “Total Recall” and “RoboCop” — has a proven gift for making highly polished genre movies that appear to have been tailored to the intellect and interests of 13-year-old male audiences, must now contend with the #MeToo movement.
Besson, who wrote “Anna” himself, wants the guessing game of where her allegiances lie to appear complicated, but it’s rather elementary, making the plot of John le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” feel like higher-level calculus by comparison.
Looking more like a character out of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the Brit acting veteran creates one of film’s great dragon ladies—a Soviet-era holdover with oversized brown glasses, Khrushchev-issue suits to match, Margaret Thatcher hair, and a cigarette lighter shaped like a hand grenade.
Her toying with her male counterparts is a little too reminiscent of Basic Instinct and The Last Seduction, while some the modelling scenes could have been deleted scenes from either Pret a Porter or, dare I say it, Showgirls.
Think of it as a downmarket Atomic Blonde (a film that does Besson’s established shtick with a lot more panache and less ick) or Red Sparrow without the surface-level professionalism; what’s clear is that Besson doesn’t want anyone to think about Anna very hard.
Just look at recent films like the John Wick series, Red Sparrow, Polar, Atomic Blonde…the list goes on.
Let’s stop here and acknowledge there is nothing wrong with stylish emptiness in an action movie, as Atomic Blonde proved, nor is there a problem with ass-kicking female spies.
I know Atomic Blonde did it too but the point is we’re getting there to where action heroes won’t have to be heteronormative.
If even 2017’s grandly entertaining and grossly overlooked Atomic Blonde couldn’t get people into theaters, there’s even less chance for something as rote as Anna.
A year earlier, Charlize Theron had appeared in “Atomic Blonde,” an intense triple-crossing, Iron Curtain action movie, which gave the Oscar-winning glamour queen the opportunity to demonstrate that she could outmaneuver any man — female empowerment as hyperkinetic fashion show.
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Luc Besson rehashes 'La Femme Nikita' in his return to the spy-assassin genre, which stars Sasha Luss with Luke Evans, Helen Mirren and Cillian Murphy.
Will it be a return to form for Besson; a new take on La Femme Nikita, Leon: The Professional or even The Fifth Element?
He uses the same framework in Anna as he did in La Femme Nikita, Leon: The Professional, Lucy, and even The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc.
It’s roughly the same outline as the director’s 1991 hit “La Femme Nikita,” which proved the French could outdo Hollywood at making action movies.
“Anna” has a lot of similarities to “ La Femme Nikita ,” “The Professional” and “Lucy” — all Besson movies about strong young women forced into a life of violence.
So there are a lot of irritants and clumsy touches to Besson’s latest, infuriatingly inferior version of “La Femme Nikita” that ruin it.
On a storytelling level, Anna is a brazen, borderline lawsuit worthy rip-off of the similarly grimy and useless Red Sparrow, but at least that film had some depth, good performances, and confidence.
Think of it as a downmarket Atomic Blonde (a film that does Besson’s established shtick with a lot more panache and less ick) or Red Sparrow without the surface-level professionalism; what’s clear is that Besson doesn’t want anyone to think about Anna very hard.
At least “Red Sparrow,” a more dangerous and full-bodied take on this same premise, dared to get its hands dirty.
Just look at recent films like the John Wick series, Red Sparrow, Polar, Atomic Blonde…the list goes on.
Less than three months later, Fox released “Red Sparrow,” an extra-icy Cold War thriller about a Russian ballerina (played by Jennifer Lawrence) recruited by Soviet foreign intelligence to become an assassin and spy, trained to use her sex appeal as a weapon while leveraging her intelligence to outwit her handlers.
Besson has always had a sharp eye for action, and even though his imagination has been exhausted and he seems to be operating on auto-pilot, the balletic frenzy of his shoot-outs is still a cut above what American films typically offer (“John Wick” notwithstanding).
Just look at recent films like the John Wick series, Red Sparrow, Polar, Atomic Blonde…the list goes on.
Much like John Wick, Anna has a balance of impossibly creative kills and hits with guns that actually run out of bullets.
In the age of John Wick , a franchise that knows exactly what it wants to do and how to make it look like a neon-dripped work of art, Anna just doesn’t stack up.
Anna might not be quite as good an action movie as Atomic Blonde or the latest John Wick , but at least it works better than Jennifer Lawrence’s Red Sparrow .
(And bad editing: Most of the fight scenes are so frenetically cut that you can’t follow the flow of movement, which feels particularly dated now that we’re all used to John Wick and the previously mentioned Atomic Blonde.)
Her toying with her male counterparts is a little too reminiscent of Basic Instinct and The Last Seduction, while some the modelling scenes could have been deleted scenes from either Pret a Porter or, dare I say it, Showgirls.
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But culture is changing fast, and critics who once touted Tarantino as a feminist for celebrating such women in “Jackie Brown” and the “Kill Bill” movies are now grossed out by the director’s foot fetish.
(“Resident Evil” star Milla Jovovich owes her action-figure career to Besson, who saw that potential in her with “The Fifth Element.”)