Directed by:
Luc BessonScreenplay:
Luc BessonCinematography:
Thierry ArbogastComposer:
Eric SerraCast:
Sasha Luss, Helen Mirren, Luke Evans, Cillian Murphy, Lera Abova, Aleksandr Petrov, Никита Павленко, Anna Krippa, Aleksey Maslodudov, Eric Godon, Ivan Franěk (more)VOD (3)
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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. Sasha Luss in the title role with Helen Mirren, Cillian Murphy and Luke Evans. (Lionsgate UK)
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Reviews (10)
A stylish action movie with an atomic blonde in the role of a brilliant spy. High-octane fun with breathtaking choreography and a perfect team of actors in the supporting roles. It’s just the kind of nonsense that, despite being terribly naïve, was made with such gusto that you’re going to want to watch it more than many an Oscar winner. Besson’s still got it.
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Luc Besson serves up a great spy action thriller with a sex appeal-laden Sasha Luss. It's exactly the kind of gritty action flick that has been missing from cinemas for the last few years. The main character is having a hard time in life, in fact she's almost broke until she gets the opportunity to become a KGB government assassin with no competition. Cillian Murphy as the CIA chief and Luke Evans from the KGB are also great. The frequent time jumping is slightly confusing at first, but it gets proper meaning as the film progresses and there are surprisingly enough unexpected twists. There could have been more action, but when it comes down to it, you'll be sweating pretty hard. The five-minute restaurant scene in one take rivals John Wick, and cutting guys with a torn plate instead of a knife is an awesome idea! There are more than enough headshots and dead bodies. I had fun, just what I needed at the movies this summer. 80%
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Anna is the best European mainstream spy flick since Skyfall. It is stylishly filmed, with a constantly surprising screenplay focusing not only on the action, but also on the characters. It is also well cast and wonderfully balanced politically (CIA vs. KGB). The choreography of the fight scenes, chases and shootouts is precise. Sexually passionate (Anna with men), emotionally tender (Anna with her lesbian girlfriend), seductively promiscuous through and through and as relationally treacherous as the whole dark world of secret agents. As far as spy thrillers go, I maximally enjoyed everything about this film, plus it surprised me with its clever humor and original interpretation of traditional genre motifs. Besson has a peace-loving European heart and is still a great filmmaker!
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If Anna had been the work of some newcomer, there would have been great admiration for the cleverly written screenplay and solid directing. But for Luc Besson, it’s not all that astounding. The film rather looks like one of his genre flicks, which he had previously passed on to his younger collaborators. Perhaps it should have been handed off before his EuropaCorp was impacted by debts and Besson and his colleagues were forced to lay people off and sell the company’s subsidiaries. In the context of that part of Besson’s filmography, where he figures in as the creator of the theme, co-author of the screenplay and producer, Anna deservedly ranks highly as a precision-crafted variation on the masterwork Nikita, updated to a glossily more superficial form and made special by it outstanding screenplay, which after a certain amount of runtime always rotates the field of view, thus transforming the viewers’ perspective not only on events that they saw a moment ago, but also on the titular heroine. From an originally apathetic object, she first becomes a clever tool and then, after a few turns, she appears as a sophisticated manipulator and, primarily, a chess genius making plans numerous steps ahead of the viewer and the other characters. In addition to that, we have action scenes that do not deny the inspiration of Atomic Blonde, and even though the ambitious and causally designed choreography cannot come close to that of Atomic Blonde, they still offer a refreshing hyperkinetic physical spectacle. But then one remembers that this is an original work by the same man who was once able to do much more enthralling things with the characters of women who find themselves in the unwanted position of action heroines. In Nikita, he showed the world of spies as a ruthless and sordid place where the heroine desperately faces helplessness and, like a predatory beast, has to fight not only for her life, but above all else for her sanity and whatever remains of her innocence. In Lucy, on the other hand, Besson released the whole genre from the shackles of unnecessary rationality and let his heroine transform the connective tissue of reality/film and, through this destruction of rules, create a cyberpunk innovation that showed us how unnecessarily limited films are when they sacrifice imagination at the expense of believability. Besson was a filmmaker who enchanted viewers, cooked up modern-day fairy tales and thrilling fantasies, sought out poetry in the grimy corners of everyday environments, opened our hearts to hired killers and extra-terrestrial beings, and invited us to new worlds beyond the boundaries of our own imagination. If the publicists’ predictions come to pass and EuropaCorp is hit with bankruptcy and Besson by numerous accusations, Anna may paradoxically be his last battle for viewers. Perhaps Besson is a relic of another time and can no longer easily find an audience that is sufficiently in tune with his vision. Perhaps for today's audience, Anna can be a welcome refreshment and a good genre treat. For witnesses whose love for cinema was at least in part inspired by Besson’s early films, however, it is rather a sad denouement.
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At the end of Besson's La Femme Nikita, Tchéky Kario smilingly announces to her boyfriend that they're going to miss the girl and he just takes an unhappy drag from his cigarette, nods his head and looks out the window in response. And I kind of think that despite all this, this is how we're going to talk about Luc Besson when it all falls apart, Europa Corp goes bankrupt, and he himself goes into images of the past. Because as much as we may freak out about the lack of logic, the lack of a coherent plot, the attempt to disguise the awful digital imagery, the completely incomprehensible anachronisms (for at least the second time with Besson, I feel like he decided on the period when the film would be set no earlier than in post-production), or the lack of dramaturgy, we still have to remember that this is the price we pay today for watching some of the last of the West’s auteur action films. Moreover, in this case, Besson takes a ways further his torch of the Cinéma du look movement, which worked with a distinctive advertising aesthetic, among other things. Indeed, everything here is completely secondary to the product Besson is interested in – the three-foot, thirty-pound and, in the action scenes, utterly breathtaking Sasha Luss. That's why the only things that work in the film are the things she touches, and only because she’s the one touching them. The resulting Gaussian curve, where we are moved from irritating civilian scenes to the best action sequences of the year, is probably best expressed in the words of Milan Vébro, director of Settlement of Crows 2: "It was great! It was terrible."
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