Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) French Title: Le Pacte des Loups

Starring: Samuel Le Bihan, Mark Dacascos, Jérémie Renier, Vincent Cassel, Émilie Dequenne, Monica Bellucci, Jacques Perrin, Christian Marc, Karin Kriström, Philippe Nahon, Virginie Darmon, Vincent Céspedes, Hans Meyer, Jean-Paul Farré

Director: Christophe Gans

Action Director: Phillip Kwok

France, 1764. Almost thirty years before the French Revolution, the province of Gévaudan is having a pest control problem. A “beast” has been praying on women and children, mainly those belonging to the peasantry. The locals now live in fear of the beast and news of the attacks have reached the Court of Louis XV. This has been compounded by the circulation of a book that claims that the attacks are God’s retribution for the moral decay of the French Court, further stoking the fires that will erupt into outright bloodshed and mass executions in a quarter decade.

The Court thus sends one of their “naturalists,” Sir Gregoire de Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan), a veteran of the French-Indian Wars in the New World, to investigate. Accompanying him is his blood-brother, an Iroquois Indian named Mani (Mark Dacascos, of Drive and Cradle 2 the Grave). They are received by the Marquis d’Apcher (Hans Meyer) and his son, Tomas (Jérémie Renier). Tomas quickly takes to Gregoire, mainly on account of the former’s fascination with what life in the New World was like. Gregoire is introduced to a bunch of people from the local nobility, including Jean-Francois de Morangias (Vincent Cassel, of Ocean’s Twelve) and his hot sister, Marianne (Émilie Dequenne).

Popular sentiment attributes the attacks to an especially large wolf, although both Mani and Gregoire doubt that. The latter does so on account of the bite structure of the wounds found on a naked woman lying in a pond, which doesn’t correspond to that of a common Eurasian wolf. Mani, on the other hand, is as spiritual as we assume most Native Americans are and since the wolf is his totem animal, he cannot identify the beast among the local wolf population. Not that the locals, who all assume that American Indians are ignorant savages, really care what Mani thinks.

The hunt for the beast is initially spearheaded by Captain Duhamel (Eric Prat), whose band of bumbling guards are more effective in harassing the local peasantry than they are in finding the monster. Meanwhile, Gregoire splits his time between trying to court Marianne and enjoying nights of pleasure with an Italian prostitute named Sylvia (Monica Bellucci, of The Matrix Reloaded and Shoot’em Up). Eventually, the Court sends the king’s Bearer of Arms, Antoine de Beauterne (Johan Leysen), to relieve Captain Duhamel and assume responsibility for hunting the beast. Gregoire quickly learns that Beauterne’s presence is strictly political: the circulation of the aforementioned book is really starting to cause problems among the general public and decisive action needs to be taken to show them that the king has hardly “fallen from grace.”  So, Beauterne kills a wolf and brow-beats Gregoire, also an accomplished taxidermist, into making the wolf “into the beast.” You know, so the King has something to show his people and allay their fears.

After his visit to Paris, Gregoire and Mani quickly return to Gédauvan to find the real beast. And that is where our two heroes, assisted by Tomas d’Apcher, will find themselves knee-deep in a conspiracy that goes beyond the local wildlife running amok…

The Beast of Gévaudan is an actual piece of French History, almost comparable to England’s Jack the Ripper in that we’re still not quite sure who (or what, in this case) the culprit is. The beast terrorized the countryside of the Gévaudan province between 1764 and 1767, ultimately taking the lives of about 113 people (according to a 1987 study). The creature was apparently shot and killed by a wolf hunter named Jean Chastel, who appears in this film as a minor character (played by the late Phillippe Nahon). To this day, scholars are still not sure what animal the Beast was, with hypthoses ranging from a larger-than-average wolf, a particularly pesky pack of them, to an escaped lion or hyena that would have been brought back from French colonies in Africa.

The film does include a lot of historical personages in the story: Yes, the initial hunt for the beast was supervised by Captain Duhamel, who proved to be incompetent at his job. At one point, the Court did send François Antoine (along with his son, Antoine de Beauterne), a royal arms bearer, to hunt the beast. There was indeed a young Marquis d’Apcher who tried to catch the beast using traps—there is a sequence like this near the end. And yes, the Bishop of Mende, renamed Father Sardis (Jean-Paul Farré) for the film, did preach from the pulpit that the Beast of Gévaudan was indeed a scourge sent from God.

So, does that make Brotherhood of the Wolf a historical film? Sort of. Kinda. The thing with unsolved mysteries is that filmmakers have the creative license to tell whatever story they wish that fits into the scant facts available. The final explanation for the Beast of Gévaudan is probably a bit more plausible than the portrayal of the Beast itself, although I won’t explain why in order to avoid spoilers (on a 24-year-old film). That said, there are A LOT of characters to keep track of, all of whom have their own agendas and secrets. Although the explanation of the beast is sort of plausible, there are details to the story that are a bit out there, like the Vatican’s answer to MI6 getting involved in the mix.

The film is actually a multi-genre concoction mixing elements of history, horror and action, more specifically martial arts. Yes, the ethnically-fluid Mark Dacascos is playing another nationality for the umpteenth time: he has played Chinese (Cradle 2 the Grave and China Strike Force); Japanese (American Samurai and Crying Freeman); Mongolian (Nomad); Thai (The Legend of Bruce Lee); and this time he’s playing Native American. A Native American played by a Filipino actor trained in Chinese martial arts. There is even a smidgen of eroticism, thanks to Monica Bellucci, one of the world’s most beautiful women. In other words, Brotherhood of the Wolf offers a little something for all viewers.

Of course, since I’m reviewing it for this site, my own focus will be on the martial arts content. This is one of two films that former Venom Mob troupe member Phillip Kwok did in France, the other being Les Samourais, starring Yasuaki Kurata. He has stated in interviews that when he went to Hollywood to work on Tomorrow Never Dies, he was given very little elbow room to show off his creativity. He then remarked that for Brotherhood of the Wolf, director Christophe Gans gave him more free reign over the action. You see this a lot with the weapons the characters use, which range from standard quarterstaffs to iron claws (think The Owl from the Daredevil comics) to tomahawks to a bone sword that functions like Ivy’s whip-sword from Soul Calibre. 

Mark Dacascos fans will like that he gets three fight sequences to demonstrate his skills. The first is a fight in the rain against Captain Duhamel’s thuggish guards, who are picking on a woman they accuse of being a witch. The fight is a mixture of his kicks and some staff work. The next fight, where he fights a bunch of gypsy hunters at the registration for a big hunt, is probably his best. Lots of good bootwork from both sides—I assume the stuntmen were trained in Savate and Asian martial arts themselves--and a nice length. The third fight has him fighting those same gypsy hunters, this time with a tomahawk. The choreography is even better here, though the fight is a lot shorter than the previous one. Actor Samuel Le Bihan, whose character has largely been an observer and thinker, steps up in the last thirty minutes, showing us that his character did learn more than a thing or two about combat during his tenure in the New World. Lots of stylish knife and sword action in two major set pieces at the end. Great stuff all around, especially by 2001 non-Hong Kong standards. And even then, Hong Kong was suffering a massive decline in quality of their action films at the time.

I think most viewers will take exception to the film’s length, as it runs close to two and a half hours. Although that is the standard running time for most Marvel films since Civil War, this is a French film and the pacing is a bit more languid outside of the action sequences. Director Gans takes time to have the characters interact and develop a complex web of relationships between all of them. For the most part, the investment pays off, but it takes it sweet time to do so. But the film is interesting enough to keep most viewers involved, even during its lulls.

Capsule Reviews - Brucesploitation Movies

The Dragon Lives (1976)
aka King of Kung Fu; He's a Legend, He's a Hero 
Chinese Title: 詠春大兄
Translation: Wing Chun Brother

Starring: Bruce Li, Betty Chen Pei-Zhen, Su Hsiang, Hsueh Han, Yam Ho, Lee Wan-Chung, Han Su, Hu Chi
Director: Wang Hsing-Lei
Action Director: Huang Kuo-Chu

Strange biopic from Bruce Li--one of five he made between 1974 and 1976--that jumps around tonally. Bruce heads to San Francisco as a young man and then hitches a ride, hobo-style, to Long Beach for the infamous Long Beach International Karate Championships, which is portrayed like the tournament scene in Master of the Flying Guillotine. Bruce takes on the heavyweight boxing champion and wins, which earns him a place on "The Green Hornet." When Bruce has a dispute with the director of the latter's insistence that he wear a queue, Bruce heads back to Hong Kong and becomes a movie star. He has an affair with Betty Ting Pei (Chen Su-Chen) and starts training himself to death, especially when he gets invited to work on a (fictitious) film co-starring the aforementioned boxer.

Bruce Lee - A Dragon Story was more accurate, but had so little action that American distributors had to splice in fights from Superior Youngster and Little Superman. Young Bruce Lee really just did its own thing. This one pays lip service to events in Bruce Lee's life, and jumps back and forth in tone between happy-go-lucky, somber (whenever he's pondering the treatment of Asians in Hollywood), and even dark (whenever he's over-training himself). The recreations of fights from his movies are better than those in Dragon Story, especially the Fist of Fury dojo scene. Strangely enough, the movie ends with him having sex with Betty Ting Pei: Yep, a kung fu movie whose climax is also the lead actress's.

All that said, you're better off sticking with Bruce Lee's Secret and Bruce Lee - The Man, the Myth.

Bruce and Shaolin Kung Fu (1977)
Aka: Ching Wu & Shaolin Kung Fu; Fist and Fury Part 2; Bruce and Shao-Lin Kung Fu
Chinese Title: 達魔鐵指功
Translation: Demonic Iron Finger

Starring: Bruce Le, Chan Sing, James Nam Seok-hoon, Kim Jeong-ran, Bae Soo-cheon, Chiang Tao, Bolo Yeung Sze, Jang Il-shik, Lee Hang, Nick Cheung Lik
Director: James Nam, Cho Seok
Action Director: Tang Tak-Cheung

I think some consider this one of the better Bruce Le films out there, alongside Enter the Game of Death and Clones of Bruce Lee. This is arguably one of the more competent films he made, sticking with the familiar Fist of Fury template. In some territories, the film is known as Fist of Fury Part 2 and is presumably set at a time after the events of the original in which the Ching Woo school has spread beyond Shanghai and is actually doing quite well for itself. Le plays Ching Ling, one of the top students of the Ching Woo School, who has been up in the mountains practicing kung fu with a Shaolin master (Chan Sing, in an extended came). Upon finishing up his training, Ching Ling and his friend, Kang Jin (Nick Cheung Lik), return to Shanghai, where things are heating up under the command of Japanese General Yae Ho (Bae Soo-cheon, in yet another scenery-chewing performance). Yae Ho and his advisors want to eliminate kung fu schools in China in order to put down any possible rebellion. The General has his son, a lieutenant in the Japanese army and a karate master, is tasked with defeating Chinese martial arts.

When Ching Ling comes back to Ching Woo, he finds the school in shambles. He challenges the Lieutenant to a duel and humiliates him, resulting in the latter committing hara-kiri. Now a persona non grata in Shanghai, Ching Ling departs for Korea, which is already a Japanese colony. He hooks up with Master Po Sai Lam (James Nam), a martial brother of Ching Ling’s master. He starts learning Taekwondo and a special fist style. Meanwhile, the Japanese send a group of killers (including Chiang Tao and Bolo Yeung) to Korea to look for Ching Ling. Lots of fights break out. When the General arrives in Korea for a military conference, Ching Ling and Master Po’s daughter (Kim Jeong-ran), try to assassinate him.

There is quite a bit of fighting, staged by Tang Tak-Cheung (best known for Tiger Over Wall and Kung Fu Zombie). As usual, Bruce Le tries to mix his Bruce Lee impression with his own hung gar training. I don’t know why, but his shtick in movies often grows old very quickly. He’s a decent athlete, but if he doesn’t have a good choreographer, his fights easily get repetitive. I think it has to do with the fights themselves often about dodging and evading, instead of complex exchanges of techniques. Obviously, a style like hung gar lends itself out to elaborates shapes fighting, but Le tries to do something a little more “Bruce-y” with it and it just doesn’t work.

Bolo Yeung fights with a strange gorilla style (which I assume is the inspiration for the German title, “Die Gelbe Gorila” – The Yellow Gorilla), but it’s not particularly interesting. Kim Jeon-ran, best known for playing Jackie’s tomboy friend in Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin, does some good fighting, especially when she’s trying to murder a room full of military officials. Nick Cheung Lik’s talents are completely wasted, unfortunately. Chan Sing fares better, getting a fight with Chiang Tao and his goons and showing off both his signature tiger style and a smattering of crane, too. Too bad he didn’t get more fight time in the film.

The penultimate fight pits Bruce Le in a lengthy duel with Chiang Tao, which is broken up by frequent running (almost more than Little Godfather from Hong Kong). He finally defeats him by attacking a bunch of pressure points, which was the basis for his training at the beginning of the movie. His final match is with a pair of white-haired fighters armed with metal poles with detachable claws at the end. It’s at this point that Bruce gets to use nunchaku as we expect in this sort of film. In one loopy moment, the two fighters (I think they’re father and son) stand behind one another and start waving their arms and ducking and weaving in an attempt to confuse Bruce. Bruce and Shaolin Kung Fu is a pretty decent, if unoriginal film. On a sliding scale of Bruce Le films, that would put it somewhere as a three (out of five). The film ends in an obvious nod to the original Fist of Fury, but a sequel was made the following year.

Return of the Tiger (1977)
Chinese Title: 大圈套
Translation: Big Trap

Starring: Bruce Li, Angela Mao Ying, Chang Yi, Blacky Ko, Lung Fei, Hsueh Han, Cheng Fu-Hung, Wang Chi-Sheng, Wang Yung-Sheng, Hsieh Hsing
Director: Jimmy Shaw
Action Director: Hsieh Hsing

The film starts off promisingly: the credits are set over the training regimen of a bunch of men inside of a gym. Angela Mao then enters the place and beats everyone up for several minutes, Hapkido-style. We then learn that she's working for Chang Hung (Bruce Li), who has a beef with the owner of the gym, Paul (Paul L. Smith). He says that Paul killed his dad and he wants him to shut down his gym and film studio. Paul has his number one flunkie, Peter Chan (Chang Yi), talk to Chang Hung into switching sides, but to no avail. Chang Hung gets the attention of Paul's rival, the crime boss Sing (Lung Fei), who tries to woo Chang Hung to his side.

He has Chang Hung fight Paul's bodyguard, Tom (Cheng Fu-Hung, who spends the film wearing a sweatshirt with 'TOM' embroidered on it), in order to prove his worth. He sort of joins Sing's gang, but we find out that he is actually a hitman hired by Paul to eliminate Sing, and so the blood vendetta with Paul is just a ruse. But both sides, who turn out to be rival heroin dealers, start to get suspicious of Chang Hung. And Paul tries to sell his unsold heroin stash (to quote Chris Rock: "People don't sell drugs, drugs sell themselves") to Sing, leading in a huge brawl. And then it turns out that Chang Hung and Angela are actually working for the law. A big brawl, replete with double crosses, ensues.

Compared to a lot of kung fu films from the period, it is interesting that there isn't a whole lot of action in this. There is a Yojimbo quality to the plot, with Chang Hung kinda-sorta playing both groups against each other, although even if Chang Hung didn't get involved, both sides would've suffered mutually-assured destruction by the end. It takes about 30 minutes for Bruce Li to have his first fight scene. There was a nice dojo sequence, with Huang Kuo-Chu doing some great kicks. Bruce Li has a brief scuffle with choreographer Hsieh Hsing, who plays an assassin hired by Sing. He then fights some would-be motorcycle assassins, led by Blackie Ko in a mullet. The finale is a huge free-for-all. It is interesting watching Chang Yi, always the intimidating villain, getting manhandled by a burly white guy. Bruce Li's scuffle with Paul L. Smith is long and brutal, full of found objects being used as weapons. Angela Mao is wasted in the finale, unfortunately. She should've gotten a good throwdown with Hsieh Hsing and Lung Fei.

Edge of Fury (1978) 
Aka: Blood on His Hands
Chinese Title: 撈家撈女撈上撈
Translation: Fishing for the family, fishing for the daughter, fishing for the top

Starring: Bruce Li, Michelle Yim, Gam Ming, Dana, Yasuaki Kurata, David Cheng Dai-Wai, Wai Lit, Kao Yuen, Ng Tung
Director: Lee Tso-Nam
Action Director: Gam Ming (Tommy Lee)

One of Bruce Li's lesser films, mainly because the film is kind of dull. There is fighting to be had, thanks to Tommy Lee, but much less of it than your average Brucesploitation potboiler, and of a lesser quality than one might expect. We do get a brief glimpse of Dana's tits, if that's any sort of consolation. Between this, Storming Attacks, Bruce Li in New Guinea, and his sex scene with a hot gwailo chick in Dynamo, Ho Chung-Tao must have been the happiest man working in 1978.

Bruce Li plays Fong Pao (or Ah Fong), a kung fu expert and chaffeur for a tycoon named Mr. Chun (Pak Man-Biu, of The Blade Spares None). One day, Fong is at work when he is visited by the police. Chun has been arrested in Thailand for drug smuggling and the police need to question Fong to see how much he knows about his boss's activities. The answer is "Very little." However, that doesn't stop the neighbors from talking smack about Fong and mistreating his mother, those lazy talebearing bitches. Fong is assaulted by Gau Jai (Tommy Lee), who was Chun's second-in-command. Initially, the question revolves around "What do you know and how much did you tell the police?"

At this point, the film breaks off into three stories. One of them revolves around Fong Pao's travails as people turn their backs on him because he worked for a criminal. A second subplot revolves around Chun's widow (Dana, of Inframan and Storming Attacks)--the guy is eventually executed--and her attempts to get her hands on her husband's will. She wants all of his assets to share with her lover, played by Wai Lit. Finally, Gau Jai and Chun's business partner, Mr. King (Yasuaki Kurata, of Win Them All and The Angry Guest), are trying to find where Chun used to hide "the stuff." They are convinced that Fong Pao knows and Mr. King even goes so far as to employ Ah Fong in order to get the information out of him. When he insists that he doesn't know, Gau Jai kidnaps Ah Fong's girlfriend (Michelle Yim) in order to force him to talk.

Edge of Fury is a very talky film. And there is no real interaction between the two main story threads of the missing "stuff" and Dana trying to get her hands on her husband's wealth. I think most viewers will be impatiently counting down to the next fight scene or wondering if Dana will doff the duds--there is a shot of her from behind a shower box and later where she tries to seduce the guy administering her husband's estate (Kao Yuen, of Fingers that Kill and The Blind Boxer).

The action is just okay. Lee Tso-Nam and Tommy Lee had obviously done some great work together: The Hot, the Cool, and the Vicious and Challenge of Death, to name two. Tommy Lee and Lee Tso- had worked with Bruce Li on Fist of Fury, Part II and did a pretty good job there. Edge of Fury is all three men working below their respective potential. Li's fighting is in Bruce Lee imitation mode, but the way he maintains a pose after punching or kicking someone is just distracting here. Tommy Lee can't seem to decide if he wants to choreograph a Bruce Lee imitation, traditional shapes, or early 70s basher style. His work is all over the place here. The finale with Yasuaki Kurata is brutal, but sloppy. Both men have done far better work in other movies. The entire film consists of talented people working at their most mediocre...not their worst, but their most average.

Anna (2019)

Anna (2019)

Starring: Sasha Luss, Helen Mirren, Luke Evans, Cillian Murphy, Lera Abova, Alexander Petrov, Nikita Pavlenko, Eric Godon

Director: Luc Besson

Action Director: Alain Figlarz, Florian Beaumont, Daren Nop, David Nop

Sometimes the Devil is in the Details. I actually thought Anna was a good movie and could have been a very good movie, if not for some flubbed details that I will get into later. The movie feels like yet another entry in the “Female Spy / Hitwoman” sweepstakes that started with Angelina Jolie in Salt. We’ve gotten A LOT of these movies starring A-list (and occasionally B-List, but still recognizable) actresses: Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Lawrence, Karen Gillan, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Maggie Q, etc. This one sets itself apart in that the lead, Sasha Luss, isn’t an well-known actress (her biggest project before this was a supporting role in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets). And the premise, I suspect, paints itself as a remake of writer-director Luc Besson’s own La Femme Nikita.

The events of the film are presented out of order and are frequently replayed from different perspectives (or with extra information added), so let’s start from the beginning. At some point in (presumably) the late 1980s, there is young Soviet woman named Anna (Sasha Luss) who is living with her dead-end druggie boyfriend, Piotr (Alexander Petrov). Piotr smokes weed, kidnaps American tourists (in the Soviet Union?), and sleeps around, and Anna is too passive to do much about it. 

One day, Piotr’s antics get them chased by the law, although they are lucky enough to get away. When they arrive at their apartment, a stranger is waiting for Anna. The man, Alexei (Luke Evans, of No One Lives and The Immortals), promptly shoots Piotr to death before giving Anna an offer. She initially refuses—going so far as to slit her wrist (we figure out quickly that Alexei works for the KGB, so her logic is that she’ll end herself before he can)—but ultimately takes him up on his offer. Within a year, Anna has completed her training and is now a bad-ass KGB honeypot hitwoman who can quote entire swaths of Russian literature. And she can play a mean game of chess.

Anna’s first job requires her to take out some Russia mobster at a restaurant, but with a twist: the gun her superior, Olga (Helen Mirren, of the Red movies), has given her is empty. She manages to complete the mission, but just barely. Several missions later, Anna’s next assignment requires her to go undercover as a model in Paris. One of the partners in the company she’s working for is a Soviet / Russian importer named Oleg (Andrew Howard, of I Spit on Your Grave and Revolver). They start to fall in love (notwithstanding her lesbian relationship will fellow model Maude), only for Anna to blow his brains out (with a pistol and a suppresser, not her mouth) after he confesses to moving arms to rebels in Syria and Chechnya (you know, places that Russia has always had a stake in).

Anyway, since security cameras caught her both entering and leaving the place around the time of the hit, she is quickly picked up by the CIA. The Boys from Langley are represented by Agent Lenny Miller (Cillian Murphy, of 28 Days Later and Batman Begins). Miller ostensibly sees through Anna’s alibi, but still allows her to go free. Not long after that mission, Anna returns to Moscow to report to KGB head Vassiliev (Eric Godon), who promptly dispels all of Alexei’s promises: she either works as an assassin until she dies, or until the KGB tires of her and has her killed. Any promise of freedom made to her is completely void. And once she returns to Paris, she’ll discover that the CIA is still onto her.

Luc Besson has often been attacked for not having done anything good in the wake of his Hollywood successes: Leon (The Professional) and The Fifth Element. I think that maybe be little overstated, as a writer and/or producer, the man has worked on a lot of important action films—Danny the Dog; Kiss of the Dragon; The Transporter films; and the Taken movies (among many others). That said, this film does strike me as him trying to reclaim that former glory, given that both this and La Femme Nikita revolve around a directionless waif on the wrong side of the tracks finding work as a professional assassin. And I have to give Besson credit: he has been doing strong action heroines since before it was fashionable to do so (certainly for a lot longer than Jennifer Lawrence has been in the business).

I thought that lead actress Sasha Luss was both pretty enough and strong enough as an actress to be believable as a honeypot killer who would not like to stay in the occupation longer than needed. She also is more dependent on her marksmanship than her hand-to-hand skills, although the fight in the restaurant is a fantastic piece of action choreography. Luss turns on the sex appeal when she needs to—and she’s certainly easy on the eyes—although I didn’t find the love scenes to be all that sexy. Some of them aren’t meant to come across as that: they are more displays of animal instinct than moments of eroticism. But when a woman is trained to be a honeypot, I’m pretty sure that sex as a demonstration of love is simply not a thing. As the film goes on, you see that sex to her has become just another tool—a chess piece, if you will—in the game she has to play against everybody.

The action was choreographed by Alain Figlarz, who had previously worked on films like The Transporter: Refueled; the Taken sequels; and the Japanese film The Fable (which I’ve heard glowing things about the action). He does a solid job, with the big restaurant fight standing out. In a scene not unlike La Femme Nikita, Anna goes into a restaurant, points a gun at her target, and pulls the trigger. To her surprise, there no bullets in a gun. Thus starts a huge brawl where Anna must take out a dozen bodyguards using her fisticuffs, silverware, broken plates, and the works. It’s just a great scene. The rest of the action revolves around Anna shooting her targets. Most of it is straight forward, although the scene where she has to escape from KGB headquarters starts moving in the direction of John Woo’s style and scope.

Good performances, storytelling, and action aside, the film’s major flaw is the setting. JUST WHEN IN THIS MOVIE SET???? You see, the film is ostensibly set in the Soviet Union. They are still using the Soviet flag—red with the hammer-and-sickle—and talk about the KGB. That would place the movie in a setting prior to August 1991, around which time the KGB was dissolved and the Russian Federation flag was adopted. But we have a scene where Agent Miller is trying to convince Anna to be a double agent and he threatens imprisonment in a black site in the Czech Republic. But the Czech Republic and Slovakia did not separate until 1992. There is also the question of “When did Russia start receiving American tourists and have ATM machines that accepted bank cards from foreign banks?” I’m pretty sure that it still wasn’t during the Soviet Union—the backstory is set several years before the main story kicks off, so it would have been in the mid-late 1980s. 

There is also the technology that is anachronistic: in 1990, I’m pretty sure that the laptops—they did exist—did not have large, high-resolution screens. That wasn’t really a thing until the mid-1990s. And while e-mail did exist to some degree, I cannot believe for one second that in 1991, you could send an e-mail with a high-resolution video file attachment that could play without stalling or taking an hour to download. And in one scene, we see Anna downloading information from a laptop onto what appears to be a bulky, primitive flash memory drive. But those weren’t a thing until the turn of the millenium. So yeah, the question stands: WHEN THE HELL IS THE MOVIE SUPPOSED TO TAKE PLACE? It’s a shame that Luc Besson couldn’t pay better attention to those details, because they took me out of what was otherwise an enthralling action-drama.