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.