Anna

2019 French action movie

Rating: 9/20

Plot: I don't have time for that.

If you saw a preview for this Luc Besson action movie with a model kicking and/or shooting people in throats and crotches, you probably knew exactly what you were getting into with this movie. There are no surprises in this thing although it's a movie that is really proud of its surprises. Early on, there's a reference to Matryoshka dolls, so you know what Besson wants to do with his character and her quest for freedom in this world of assassins and spies. Unfortunately, there's not much to this character. She's pretty and she's deadly, and in 2019, it feels like the type of character we've seen time and time again.

One stand-out action scene has the titular character killing a bunch of people in a restaurant, and as flashy and bloody as that is, it had to unfortunately hit the big screen about a month after John Wick 3 which does that thing so much better and with so much more originality and personality.

I'd like to see Helen Mirren and John Malkovich bringing their Russian accent talents to the same movie some time.

Oh, this movie might have bad chess in it. Like the action scenes, this was edited in such a dizzying way that I couldn't really tell. The whole sequence was just a cheap way to use chess as a metaphor anyway, so I already didn't like it.