Barnes & Noble

French writer-director Luc Besson (The Fifth Element) pours it all out in this dazzling action odyssey about a foul-mouthed junkie-turned-assassin. Like a French twist on Pygmalion, Nikita (the hypnotic Anne Parillaud) is a gang-running street girl who gets caught after killing a cop; in light of this, she's quizzically chosen by a shadowy intelligence bureau as the ideal Nobody to be remade and remodeled. Trained in the various arts of killing by an engagingly hangdog officer (Tcheky Karyo), she assumes the undercover alias of "Josephine" and is plopped back into society. She proceeds to kick butt without taking names, and, ironically enough, strikes up a very normal relationship with a very normal grocery worker (Jean-Hughes Anglade). Themes of socialization aside, Nikita served as a terrifically stylish Hollywood calling card for Besson, and it spawned the off-kilter remake Point of No Return as well as a somewhat campy television series. But when all the bullet casings are counted, this white-knuckle original is the one to see. Eddy Crouse

All Movie Guide

The serpentine plotline of Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita begins its 117-minute slither when punkish, psychotic, and drug-ridden Nikita (Anne Parillaud) fires her gun into a cop's face following the stick-up of a drug store, and is promptly imprisoned. She is thrown into a dank cell, then injected with a substance and told it is a lethal toxin. Instead of dying, however, the comes to in an all-white interrogation room, where French intelligence officer Bob (Tchéky Karyo), informs her that an alternate to execution exists: she can receive covert government training as an assassin. She accepts the bid, is rigorously trained, and later returns to society as a seemingly normal and gentle civilian, but falls in love with a drugstore employee while she's waiting for that first government assignment. The paradoxical concept of a young woman blossoming socially while carrying out cold-blooded murders was downplayed when La Femme Nikita was remade in America as the silly and disappointing Point of No Return, directed by John Badham with Bridget Fonda in the lead. A far less sociopathic TV-series version of La Femme Nikita surfaced on the USA cable network in early 1997. Hal Erickson

Product Details

• UPC: 043396262997
• Source: SONY PICTURES
• Aspect Ratio: Cinemascope (2.35:1)
• Presentation: Wide Screen
• Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
• Language: English, Français
• Subtitles: English, Français, Español, Portugais, Korean
• Time: 1:57:00
• Sales Rank: 27,488