Note: This review contains spoilers.
La Femme Nikita received fairly poor reviews upon its release twenty years ago. Despite the negative reception, it has had tremendous impact in popular culture, spawning a remake and multiple television series. It helped establish director Luc Besson as one a new and innovative action filmmaker. Does it hold up? Overall, yes. Though it’s brought down by a weak third act, La Femme Nikita is a refreshing take on the now-clichéd “government agency hires thug to be highly-effective super agent for some reason” plotline, combining well-executed action scenes with compelling performances and a fantastic synth score.
The plot follows Nikita (Anne Paurillard), a drug addict who kills a policeman when a pharmacy break-in goes wrong. She’s sentenced to life in prison, but a secret government organization intervenes and drugs her. When she comes to, she no longer exists. Her death has been faked and her life is not her own. Their goal is to mold her into an elite assassin. If she resists, she’ll be killed.
Anne Paurillard carries this film on her shoulders and elevates it above a typical action thriller. Her performance is so varied in its extreme range of Nikita’s personality quirks that at times I couldn’t believe I was watching the same woman. At the beginning of the film, Nikita is a drugged-up, aggressive, borderline psychotic teenager with nothing but a quick wit and temper to indicate she might, somehow, be able to eventually become a productive member of society. She’s disheveled, wide-eyed and so mentally unhinged that I was convinced, despite knowing the basic premise of the film, that she was doomed to die having failed to properly adapt to any sort of physical, mental or social training whatsoever. She was simply too far gone.