Red Anna

We were going to skip Luc Besson's Anna (2019), but I started feeling like we were never going to get a Black Widow movie, and Red Sparrow just didn't cut it.

It starts in cold-war Moscow, with a bunch of average people being detained by the KGB. Then we meet our star, Sasha Luss. She is selling matrioshka dolls in a flea market, and a talent scout offfers her a job modelling in Paris. In real life Luss is a model (although she was also the alien princess in Besson's Valerian), so that fits. In Paris, this naive Russian beauty gets involved with a Russian scumbag and arms dealer, who turns up dead. How will she get out of this?

Cut to six years earlier. We find Luss leaving her violent junkie boyfriend to join the KGB. Her trainer is Helen Mirren looking very Rosa Klebb. So she was not so naive, and in fact, is a super-spy. We get to see one of her first missions - a hit in a fashionable cafe. Mirren has given her a gun but no bullets, as a test, or possibly to get her killed. Tough love. This fight is great, but maybe we've seen it before. Offhand, I can think of a similar fight in The Spy Who Dumped Me. OK, Besson does it better.

But that is a problem with this movie. We've already seen a lot of the best scenes, maybe done better, maybe not. There's a car chase, for instance, that was just fine, not really first class. We expect something better from Luc.

But the cute "XXX years/months earlier" flashbacks are kind of fun. I should have posted a spoiler, because the first one took me by surprise. I figured out the last one, though.

I should mention Luke Evans and Cillian Murphy as her KGB and CIA handlers. They are OK. I like Luss a lot in this role - obviously it isn't hard for her to play a Russian model, but she also seemed to handle the action well. But Mirren is the real star - probably true of any movie she is in.