Nikita (1990)

(after Nikita destroys her paper target with an automatic pistol)

Professur de tir: You've used one of these before?

Nikita: Not on paper.

Nikita is a 1990 French action movie written and directed by Luc Besson. Despite having mostly poor reviews, it was remade by Warner Bros. and also into a TV series. It stars Anne Parillaud as Nikita, a junkie turned into government assassin, and Tcheky Karyo, her program mentor and advisor, who also should be noted remains nameless.

In the beginning of the movie, Nikita is a junkie. During a violent and unsuccessful burglary, she in a drug-induced state, coldly kills a police officer. She is then sentenced to life in prison but instead is taken to a secret government training facility to become an assassin. At first, she is violently unwilling, then disobedient. But after having a touching moment with Karyo's character, she accepts her training and becomes calmer. After she finishes her training, she is sent out to the real world to live as a civilian and to wait for further orders whenever they come.

She enjoys her freedom as she lives with her new, unsuspecting boyfriend in their apartment. The orders start coming in and she executes them with great success. But her final order goes horribly wrong which, in the end, leads her to run away from everything: her boyfriend, the government, and Paris.

I found the movie to be quite a bore. And for a Cross-Cultural Film class, there was really nothing French about it, except for the language. All in all, it seemed like a bad, cliche Hollywood action movie.