Full disclosure, I did the motion capture for Valerian in the film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets by Luc Besson. It was fun to work with him, he’s super French. I am a big fan of Léon: The Professional and The Fifth Element so I was really looking forward to seeing his latest film, Anna.
I settled into my seat at the cinema looking forward to a frantic couple of hours of classic Luc Besson action. From the trailer, Anna appeared to hit all of the notes Besson is known for, Femme Fatale, guns, car chases, smooth and slick direction.
Sasha Luss plays the titular Anna, a Soviet spy/killing machine who is working to pay back Russia for the years of training they invested in her. She hopes at the end of the five years of service that she will earn the freedom to be able to make her own choices.
Helen Mirren (Olga) and Luke Evans (Alex Tchenkov) ham it up with their Russian accents, while Cillian Murphy (Lenny Miller) exchanges his Irish accent for an American one. They all seem to have a fun time with the film, but the film revolves around Anna, and it’s constantly time jumping to reveal things that the audience would have no way of seeing coming except for straight luck. There are double and triple crosses and the film seems to play them as very clever, but they lack the panache of a reveal that makes you go “how did I not make that connection”.
Anna constantly mentions that she wants freedom and yet she believes the words of people that she knows are liars and thieves. She is objectified by the mostly male characters in the film and by the camera. The greater issue for me is that while all of this is happening there is one character that genuinely cares for her and Anna treats them horrible. It makes Anna less empathetic, but that could be a reflection of the world’s impact on her.
There are a few large set pieces that would be great ten years ago, however, in a post-John Wick world, action scenes that rely on quick cuts to hide the actor’s inability to perform the fight choreography feel very dated. Ultimately this film didn’t add anything new to the any of the genres it was pulling from, with no new interesting take on spies and spycraft, no amazing new action sequences, and no new take on the femme fatale.
June 16, 2019
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe