Anna (4 Stars)

Anna is a Russian drug addict who's recruited by the KGB as an assassin. On joining she's told that she'll be given one year training, after which she'll serve for five years. Then she'll be free to return to her normal life. She's highly successful in her new career, killing her victims just as calmly and efficiently as John Wick. Maybe more efficiently, because she needs less bullets. When she asks about the schedule for her discharge from the KGB she finds out that it was a lie. She was only told it was five years because she wasn't expected to live that long. The only way she can leave is death.

Does the story sound familiar? It should. It's a variation of "Nikita", which Luc Besson made in 1990. A beautiful woman trained to be a killer who wants to get out. It's difficult to review "Anna" without comparing it with "Nikita".

"Anna" doesn't show the training period, which was an important part of "Nikita". We jump straight into her life as a successful killer. She's given a job as a fashion model in Paris, the perfect cover for her activities. In the glamour world of modelling she mixes with the high society and is able to make contact with the men she has to kill.

Unlike "Nikita", "Anna" makes use of non-linear narrative to spring surprises on the viewer, jumping backwards and forwards months or years. We see something happen. In the next scenes the results aren't as expected. Then we go back to the initial event to see what really happened, the things we missed.

The film takes place towards the end of the cold war, between 1987 and 1990. The KGB are definitely the bad guys, but the CIA are also ruthless, in different ways. Both organisations are active in France, in a country that's not their own. They're both using foreign territory as their playground.

One thing that annoyed me about the film was the computer technology. Anna seems to be making an online application to join the Russian army in 1985. She downloads data from a laptop to a USB stick in 1990. What was Luc Besson thinking? Was this deliberate?

My overall impression is that this is a good movie, but it's not the sort of film I could watch more than once. I greatly enjoyed it in the cinema, but rather than watch it again I'll go back to "Nikita".