Anna (2019)
You’ve seen what Anna has to offer so many times before you’ll forget all about it down the line. It’s competently directed with some nice, clear action sequences but there’s nothing special here and its attempts to mix things up with multiple twists become tiresome.
Anna (Sasha Luss), a seemingly ordinary woman selling baubles at a Russian market is recruited as a fashion model to work in Paris. Or so those around her - including her girlfriend Maud (Lera Abova) - have been lead to believe. Actually, she’s an agent of the KGB hired by Alexander Tchenkov (Luke Evans) and working for senior agent Olga (Helen Mirren). After catching the eye of CIA agent Leonard Miller (Cillian Murphy), he suspects there’s more to her than what’s on the surface.
When there are action scenes, they’re well shot, the stunt people are more than capable of performing the moves writer/director Luc Besson asks of them, he expertly shoots combat - ensuring you can always tell who’s who and what’s happening. Sasha Luss is one sexy lady and seeing her paint the walls red with her opponents' blood and twists her body around her target's neck as she uses her weight to hurl them to the ground is something many teenage audiences will find mouth-watering. Beyond this, there’s just not much to this movie.
It’s no surprise when we learn Anna didn’t start out aspiring to be an assassin and that soon after completing her first mission, she wants out. That’s what movie special agents do. You’re not supposed to think about all of the innocent people Anna murders without a thought. The film tries to prevent you from second-guessing why you should cheer for her by telling its story in a non-linear fashion. Suddenly, it's revealed this character was doing this the whole time while this other one was doing that! This trick is used too often. After the third time, you expect the twist so not having a surprise would’ve been the surprise.
Once the dust settles, the seams in Anna begin to unravel. I don’t know anything about ‘80s era U.S.S.R. black book operations but I suspect they had enough trouble conducting their business without purposefully sabotaging their agents’ missions in an effort to test them and come on; I know she received special training but the number of opponents Anna can take down single-handedly is absurd. This movie needed some kind of novel angle and it’s got none.
When Iron Man 2 introduced Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow in 2010, people wondered when she’d get her own movie. Maybe we're still waiting because the well's run dry on original ideas for these female spy films. Hopefully, a movie will prove me wrong but it isn’t Anna. (Theatrical version on the big screen, July 2, 2019)
