Anna (2019)

[Drunk Monk]

I wrote a detailed post about this last night but it crashed so now I’m just going to post the trailer here and see if I remember what I said after the weekend.

[Drunk Monk]

Right. This film is so painfully Luc Besson who has taken his femme fatale style from cliche to caricature. Here he quickly dispenses with any formalities and gets right to it with very little sense of cya after development. The film starts in the middle, jumps back to the origin, then finishes. A young gal is recruited as an assassin and penetrates the top fashion model industry, going deep cover to get her mark. It’s preposterous with its logic leaps, but this Besson, who’s all about sexy euro action. Any substance is incidental. 

Everything hinges on the lead actress. Sasha Luss is a real life supermodel. She’s Uber hawt. Can she act? Well, that’s not really a requirement in a Besson film. She moves well enough for the action sequences and looks hawt doing them. That’s really all she had to do here.

It’s a bit until the first action sequence - maybe a half hour deep or more - but it’s solid ultravi. The choreo is mostly one cut per exchange, but clever and engaging. The story of the fights is clear enough. It’s well shot, easy to follow, and humorously brutal, sanguineous yet not graphic in the entrails spewing way. There’s a later scene that complies numerous hits into one elongated sequence - basically a series of assassinations with no context just to show that Anna has done a ton of wetwork in the past and is a proficient deliverer of violence. Then there’s a finale fight that’s worth the watch.

As for D00M recommendations, I default to the title of my longstanding media coverage column from KFTC - Fast Forward to the Fight Scenes. They’re the centerpieces of the movie. The rest of the mall looked so beneath the standards of most fight scenes that have enjoyed watching for so long  - and yet it was amusing from the outside looking in.