Anna ★★½

WHAT do Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johnsson, Bridget Fonda, Zoe Saldana, Mila Jovovich, Anne Parillaud, Sasha Luss and Maggie Q all have in common?

They have all been part of Luc Besson’s decades-long obsession with depicting sexy women kicking ass on-screen.

If Leon: The Professional is the French director’s high point, then 2019’s Anna, which featured the Russian actress Luss, occupies somewhere around the middle ground.

Luss is quite good as the young Russian women who escapes a life of addiction and domestic abuse by agreeing to become a KBG assassin, as you do when a prison sentence or life on the run are your only other choices.

The film involves one of those sometimes-annoying devices where the story flits between the presents and flashbacks in multiple time-periods, but in this case it earns the approach with a couple of decent twists that wouldn’t have worked otherwise.

The highlight is the action sequence in a restaurant where Anna is sent by her minders to kill targets for the first time – with no bullets in her gun as a test!

Helen Mirren has a grand old time playing the veteran KGB minder while the cast also features Cillian Murphy and Luke Evans as competing influences for Anna’s heart and soul.

It’s above average for this type of film which we have now seen many times.

Watched on Netflix.