Review: Anna

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

PLOT: A young Russian woman (Sasha Luss) is transformed into a deadly assassin by the KGB and placed undercover as a fashion model, in the hopes of eliminating high-value targets.

REVIEW: For me, there’s always been two Luc Besson’s. The first is the dazzling, often boldly original director who made NIKITA, THE PROFESSIONAL (or LEON if you will), THE FIFTH ELEMENT and VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (underrated – it only suffers from the fatal miscasting of the title character). But then, there’s the other, hacky Luc Besson, the one whose script for LOCKOUT was such a blatant rip-off of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK & ESCAPE FROM L.A that John Carpenter and Nick Castle sued him and won. The one who churns out low-rent action movies by the dozen at Europa Corp.

Too bad ANNA is the latter Besson, being a messy, but watchable, rip-off of a bunch of other, better movies. Put RED SPARROW, ATOMIC BLONDE, JOHN WICK, and Besson’s own NIKITA in a blender and you’ve got ANNA, a middle-of-the-road action movie that’s probably more at home on the small screen than the big one. True to form though, even if it’s wildly unoriginal and thinly plotted, it’s still reasonably fun to watch – something that can be said of even Besson’s worst movies (at least the ones he directs).

Model Sasha Luss, who played the alien princess in VALERIAN, stars as the title character. This is set between 1987-90 in Moscow, as we follow Anna being turned from a suicidal gangster’s moll to an invincible assassin under the tutelage of her handlers, played by Luke Evans and Helen Mirren – beat for beat recreating the parts played by Tchéky Karyo and Jeanne Moreau in NIKITA. In fact, the parallels to that film are so strong that this has to be intentional on Besson’s part, such as a moment where Anna is sent in on a dangerous mission with an empty gun as the final, deadly test before she’s sent out on her own.

Luss is pretty decent throughout. While she’s not given extremely memorable material to work with, she absolutely looks the part of a gorgeous international model (because she is) and acquits herself well in the action scenes. Too bad that the action is limited to a handful of really cool set pieces, with this being low-budget for a Besson film (more action would have distracted us from the recycled plot- which had critics giggling at the press screening).

Evans hits the right notes as Anna’s likable handler, although he doesn’t get to mix it up in the action department at all, while Helen Mirren chews the scenery as the heavily accented head of Anna’s KGB unit. She looks like she’s having fun hidden behind huge specs, a dark wig and an exaggerated limp. Cillian Murphy has a medium-sized role as a CIA agent bent on turning Anna into one of his assets- and possibly his lover too. He could have been portrayed as a scumbag, but he’s handled sympathetically, thanks mostly to Murphy’s charm.

One of ANNA’s big problems (and there are several) is that there’s no real villain, with an anonymous KGB general being the closest thing we get – but he has next to no screen time. The period setting is also very poorly conveyed, with Anna using a laptop that’s at least ten years too new to apply for a military post on the internet (in 1987 Russia???) and, in one extremely dumb scene, using a USB key to smuggle data. The late-eighties/early-nineties setting, paired with the glamorous, high fashion trappings of the plot could have made this a delicious concoction, but the setting is wasted.

Being a Besson film, the pace is relatively propulsive despite the two-hour running time (a shade long for this kind of film) while the cinematography by his regular DP Thierry Arbogast is top-shelf, as is the score by Eric Serra (making a welcome return after sitting out VALERIAN). In the end, ANNA is definitely Besson somewhat on autopilot, especially compared to VALERIAN (whose box office failure had to sting), but on its own merits, it’s watchable if never exceptional. For a quick action fix, it’ll do.

Anna

AVERAGE

6

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