LA FEMME NIKITA
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1991 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: This is a French sub-titled film for
people who would never go to a French sub-titled film. That
is the up-side. The down-side is that it does not provide
very much for people who would see a French sub-titled film.
This is violent adventure fluff similar to less respected
American films. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4).
This sort of plot has been done many times before in American films. Most notably, it was done in the film REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS based on the "Destroyer" books of Murphy and Sapir. Some super-secret government agency wants to create an assassin without a background so they start with someone whom the world thinks is dead, but who is not really. Maybe they even arrange the purported death, and then they train this "zombie" to be their agent. Nobody misses the person; nobody can trace the person either. That story told competently, but without too much in the way of new twists, is the currently playing French film LA FEMME NIKITA.
The film opens with four French punks breaking into a pharmacy to steal drugs for one of them, a nineteen-year-old woman who is clearly in a bad way. The robbery goes wrong for just about everyone involved: the owner of the pharmacy, the police that he calls, and the would-be robbers. Three of the punks are killed and only the young addict survives. She identifies herself to the arresting police as Nikita. This Nikita is not just bad news--she is deadly to anyone around her. The record later said that this woman committed suicide by an overdose of tranquilizers, but she is in fact administered them by injection and they are not lethal. Then begins the process of turning her from a sociopathic killer into a controlled weapon.
While LA FEMME NIKITA is playing mostly in art theaters, it is not an art film any more than DIE HARD was. This is a slick, light-weight, high- violence adventure film. Much like REMO WILLIAMS, the story of the training of the human weapon takes about half of the film and it is by far the best half. In both films the actual missions that the character is assigned are rather shallow and silly exercises. One mission seems to be only a make- work project where the organization has done everything but actually pull the trigger and sends Nikita (at great expense) to pull the trigger herself. It is not that Nikita is so great a marksperson since the shot seems an easy one. Nor is it professionally done, since she leaves the gun barrel out a window for about five minutes while she waits for her orders. Nor is it that she is still untraceable, since by this point she has a reasonably permanent new identity. The whole sequence is there only to add some comedy and a little more action to the film.
LA FEMME NIKITA stands as testimony that English-language film makers do not have the patent on silly action-adventure. This one is a likable see-once-and-forget sort of film. My rating: +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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