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.

The Fatal Raid (2019)

The Fatal Raid (2019) Aka: Special Female Force 2 Chinese Title: 不義之戰 Translation: Unrighteousness the Battle

Starring: Patrick Tam Yiu-Man, Michael Tong Man-Lung, Jade Leung, Jeana Ho Pui-Yu, Lin Min-Chen, Hidy Yu Xiao-Tong, Jadie Lin Lin-Qi, Yona Fong, Elaine Tang Yi-Ling, Rosanne Lui Saan, Sharon Luk Sze-Wan

Director: Jacky Li Chi-Lun

Action Director: Johnny Tang Shui-Wa

The Fatal Raid is interesting in that it was promoted in some markets as a sequel to Special Female Force, mainly on account of the female-focus of the action and Jade Leung’s presence. Tonally, the films are quite a bit different. The Fatal Raid takes itself deadly seriously throughout its running time, even though it has the gall to deck a female SWAT team leader in mini-shorts during a potentially-dangerous raid. The film is a dark melodrama about PTSD punctuated by intense outbursts of violence, including a 20-minute final shootout. It is also a prequel to a remake of a 1990s cult favorite that we’ll probably never get.

1998, Macau. A group of Hong Kong policemen are trying to stop a gang of arms dealers from getting away with “the goods” before crossing the border. The team includes female cops Jade Fong (Jade Leung, of Black Cat and Satin Steel) and Shirley (Overheard’s Sharon Luk), detective Tam Ka-Ming (Patrick Tam, of Beast Cops and Kung Fu Cop), and his partner Hei (Michael Tong, of Phantom of Snake and Man of Tai Chi). The bust doesn’t go as expected and a huge firefight in traffic breaks out. Most of the police officers, including Shirley, are mowed down. A young couple gets taken out, leaving their daughter behind. And finally, in a moment of friendly fire, Jade puts a bullet in Hei’s dome.

2018, Hong Kong. Tam Ma-King is now acting as a public relations spokesman for the Hong Kong Police. Jade Fong is still around, but she is still visibly haunted by the events from 20 years before. And we meet our two younger heroines: Zi Han (Vampire Clean-Up Department’s Lin Min-Chen) and Alma (Jeana Ho, playing a different role than she did in Special Female Force). Alma is a badass undercover cop and Zi Han is a sort of behind-the-scenes strategist: The former doesn’t care for the latter because she thinks Zi Han underestimates her. But Zi Han is one of those borderline geniuses who can participate in a conversation while wearing earphones and listening to music and still repeat everything that was said and more.

So, our four heroes are given what seems to be a simple mission: the Deputy Police Commissioner (Rosanne Lui, mainly known as a singer, but had bit roles in Trilogy of Swordsmanship and The 14 Amazons) of the Hong Kong Police is going to Macau to give a speech about how their efforts have lowered crime in both territories since their respective Handovers. Tam, Jade, Zi Han and Alma are given bodyguard / police escort assignments. Jade is the most nervous about it, given her past trauma in Macau. She musters up the courage and accepts the assignment. Things go well at first, until their vehicles are ambushed by a bunch of anti-police activists (Yeung Chiu-Hoi, Simon On, and Keith Chung). Although nobody is hurt, it does get the head of the Macau police department upset at Tam. You know, the whole “Every time you come here, stuff happens and my job becomes difficult” business. 

In any case, Zi Han and Alma are quite adept at using modern technology and are able to track the hooligans to their hideout. The local chief allows them to hang around as consultants, giving the task of arresting the thugs to Sheila (Hidy Yu, of Vampire Warriors and Kick-Ass Girls). It turns out to be an ambush: a whole team of commandos and a madman with a 50-caliber machine gun are waiting for the fuzz. Zi Han and Alma step in and join Sheila to help stop the baddies, only to discover that the head honcho is…Hei! This culminates in another massive shootout in traffic, as Zi Han, Alma, Sheila, and another girl named Tong Yu (Jadie Lin, of Mission Milano and Undercover Punch and Gun) team up to bring down the bad guys.

As I said before, this movie treats its premise like SRS BSNS and tries to get into the psychology of a trio of characters who were horribly scarred (mentally) by the shootout in 1998. Jade Leung spends most of the film on the verge of tears, when she’s not outright crying. She does some action in the beginning but is strangely absent from the climax. Patrick Tam’s character is demonstrated to be quite upset at the lack of sufficient compensation given to the families of dead cops—very similar to Ed Harris’s character in The Rock. But when the bullets start flying during the last 20 minutes, he goes off his rocker and descends into complete psychosis, picturing everyone around him as arms dealers (from the 1998 debacle). And Hei has a bullet in his frontal lobe, so he probably had a complete personality shift following his accident.

The four young policewomen are mainly nondescript, especially the two girls from Macau. Zi Han is depicted as being incredibly intelligent, but that’s her main quality. Alma is a bit more hardened and bitchier, and that’s her character. Tong Yu doesn’t have enough screen time to have one dimension, so she sets herself apart by being a bit taller and prettier than the other girls. Sheila starts out as a complete non-entity, but by the climax, she comes across as being a mite unhinged. If I tell you that the mid-credits twist belongs to her, you may figure out where that’s going. But yeah, with six protagonists in a film that runs 84 minutes (sans the mid-credits sequence), none of them get enough time to feel developed.

There is a fair amount of action, staged by Chin Kar-Lok Action Team member Johnny Tang. He also worked with Corey Yuen on Red Cliff and Dion Lam on the Overheard sequels. He does a credible job with the action. The end credits show the filming of the action sequences, which mix gunplay with some limited fighting. There is some classic 80s kickboxing during the apartment raid, but most of the fighting is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So, expect some crazy leg locks and take downs interspersed with the gun action. I don’t fault the action in any way, but the climax suffers from a series of narrative choices that don’t make sense: the introduction of a character that the villains are extorting money from, the heroines’ sudden switch of focus to said character’s two bodyguards, the last-minute revelation that of the three “activists,” only one of them was actually bad. Plus, the entire final sequence is overwrought in its music and OTT emotions, but at one point suddenly becomes a light comedy (complete with goofy pop music) when a Macau policeman with a crush on Zi Han suddenly shows up to give them more ammo.

I wanted to like The Fatal Raid, especially after the goofiness of Special Female Force and the slick uselessness of Martial Angels. However, the film is too cluttered and underdeveloped to make much of an impression. It’s just forgettable.

Special Female Force (2016)

Special Female Force (2016) Chinese Title: 辣警霸王花 Translation: Spicy Police Bully Flower

Starring: Eliza Sam Lai-Heung, Joyce Cheng Yan-Yi, Jade Leung Ching, Jeana Ho Pui-Yu, Cathryn Lee Yuan-Ling, Anita Chui Pik-Ka, Chris Tung Bing-Yuk, Mandy Ho Pui-Man, Philip Ng, Shirley Yeung, Stephy Tang

Director: Wilson Chin

Action Director: Wong Chi-Wai, Chin Kar-Lok Action Team

Although the English title doesn’t suggest it, Special Female Force is actually a reboot of director Wilson Chin’s own The Inspector Wears Skirts series. The Cantonese title of those films was “Ba Wong Fa,” which was the name given to the female police unit. The last three characters of this film’s Chinese title are “Ba Wong Fa” (in Cantonese), thus letting us know that Wilson was once again visiting the world of light action comedy involving female police cadets. 

The original series played like a female-led version of the Police Academy movies, usually capped with a really good action sequence—the first one featured Cynthia Rothrock as a veteran police woman who duels with Jeff Falcon at the climax. The next two entries lost Cynthia Rothrock, relying on Girls n’ Guns veteran Sibelle Hu (and her stunt double) to carry the action. The fourth film traded Hu for Cynthia Khan as the hardline commanding officer of the team, with Moon Lee playing comic relief. That film actually had the most action of the original series, although Moon Lee doesn’t cut loose until the very end.

Special Female Force opens in Thailand during the mid-90s. The “Ba Wong Fa” team, led by Macy (Kung Fu Mahjong 3’s Shirley Yeung), is staking out the place, waiting for the arrival of a terrorist known only as “The President.” They’re on a joint operation with the Thai police and all is going according to plan until they mistake the wrong man for The President. A huge gunfight breaks out and all of the team are killed, except for Song (Stephy Tang). That includes Macy, who (get ready for this) was on her final mission before (you’ll never guess) retiring (guess why) to spend time with her daughter. Tragedy! Of Greek proportions!

Twenty years later, the Ba Wong Fa program is being restarted under the supervision of Madam Song (now played by Jade Leung, of Enemy Shadow). There are twenty-four cadets vying for positions in the six-woman team, but we’ll focus on the “D” team. Let’s meet our plucky band of inept would-be crime fighters:

1. Tung (Jeana Ho, of Due West: Our Sex Journey) – She’s the ambitious and competitive one who hates the fact that her teammates are slackers. We later learn that she joined the police to spite her overly critical dad.

2. Honey (Joyce Cheng, of Cold War) – The chubby comic relief—daughter of Adam Cheng and Lydia Shum—who becomes the heart and backbone of the team, despite her less-than-imposing physical demeanor.

3. Fa (Miss Chinese Vancounter Eliza Sam) – The beautiful one who does sexy things like sleep in the nude. We later learn that she is the late Macy’s daughter.

4. Ling (Anita Chui) – She’s the tall, fashionable one with big breasts. We learn that she joined the force after being molested a lot during her youth, so she wants to get those sort of evil men off the street.

5. Cat (Cathryn Lee) – The mousy, weak-looking member of the team that’s there to prove to her chauvinist SDU boyfriend (Philip Ng) that she can be a cop.

6. Ho (The Real Iron Monkey’s Mandy Ho) – The deep-voiced lesbian of the group who wants to prove to the world that a woman can do anything a man can do.

Initially inept, the girls learn to like each other and work as a team, even after Tung almost sells them out during a game of Capture the Flag. During a training exercise, Honey leads them off course and they end up getting caught in an actual kidnapping scheme, which leads to a lengthy gunfight between the girls and the kidnappers—the SDU eventually shows up to clean up the mess. That leads to their dismissal from the program. But then another policeman, Wong Sir (Evergreen Mak, also of Enemy Shadow), shows up and informs them that they have been chosen as the top secret “B Team” for a mission in Thailand: capture The President, who’s about to release a deadly virus into the world…(four years before COVID)

There are a handful of twists and turns during the last half hour. I think at least one of them you’ll guess. A second one I did not see coming. And I already spoiled the one about Fa’s real identity, although it doesn’t really affect the plot. Fa was the character we knew least about by the time came for her to reveal herself, so most viewers would have connected her to an otherwise irrelevant plot detail from the beginning of the film.

Special Female Force follows the story structure of the other movies: kick things off with an action sequence, followed by 50 minutes of light comedy as the unlikely heroines bumble their way through training, and then end with a series of action set pieces. I have not seen The Inspector Wears Skirts II, but parts I and III were rather light on the action in terms of quantity. This actually matches a little more with the fourth film. The second act ends with the mock rescue-turned-actual rescue set piece, complete with some martial arts and a lot of gunplay. The third act actually features several action scenes: a gunfight at the pier, a gunfight at the airport, and a series of fights between the girls and the main villains.

The acting is what you would expect from this type of film. Joyce Cheng seems to have inherited both her mother’s weight and knack for fast talking. She’s no Sandra Ng, but maybe if she works enough at her game she can reach that spot. The actresses playing Fa, Ling and Cat are mainly there to look pretty (thankfully, they are). That said, they lack the natural charisma of the likes of Ann Bridgewater, Ellen Chan, and Regina Kent. The real disappointment is Jade Leung, who phones in her performance as the stern Madam Song. When Sibelle Hu and Cynthia Khan played the part, they were rigid but often knew how to humorously deal with the cadets’ antics. Song and her two subordinates show absolutely no personality throughout the entire production, except for yelling. Even when Madam Song puts it all on the line to help the girls during the climax, it doesn’t register at all because Song hasn’t shown any real personality.

The action scenes were staged by Wong Chi-Wai, a veteran action director who got his start on the much-disliked Taiwanese film The Invincible Kung Fu Trio and worked his way up to collaborate several times with Johnny To (Election; Exiled; and Fulltime Killer). Backing him up is the Chin Kar Lok Action Team—Chin himself cameos as a former Triad who assists in a training activity—including Chan Chung-Fung as the knife-wielding psycho working for The President. The action is actually quite brutal and bloody, even sadistic in some places, which clashes with the overall tone of the movie. The first two films in the original series were choreographed by the Sing Ga Ban (Jackie Chan Stuntman Association), so they knew how to keep things intense while consistent with the rest of the movie. This film starts off violent, then switches to almost an hour of girls pouting, and suddenly becomes something akin to a John Wick movie. The brief smatterings of fight choreography during the last 15 minutes feel more like that—arm locks, take downs, knife fighting—than an attempt to pay homage to 1980s kickboxing choreography. There is a bit of that in Ho’s fight with the President’s female enforcer. Philip Ng shows up to throw a couple of kicks, but don’t expect much from him.

If nothing else, Special Female Force was better than Martial Angels, which brought in a whole cadre of cute girls and did nothing interesting with any of them. It’s fluff. Fluff occasionally stained in blood, but fluff nonetheless.

This Review is part of Fighting Female February 2025