Mark Reviews Movies: ANNA (2019)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 21, 2019

There are compelling, fun, thought-provoking, and engaging ways to communicate the double-crosses and intricate games of a spy thriller. Then, there's the way that writer/director Luc Besson does it in Anna.

It's not necessarily inept, in that, whenever a new twist arrives, we understand what has happened, how it happened, and why it happened. That's mainly, though, because providing a twist and then going to great lengths to explain the reasons it occurred is the only thing Besson cares about in this movie. The screenplay doesn't have a plot so much as it possesses a series of events, connected by a blank slate of a protagonist and the broad notion that spies can be quite good at surprising their foes and allies alike.

Effective spy thrillers give us a sense of characters' minds working—toward some goal, amidst obstacles that require some improvised solution, against the minds of others in their field. We might not even know the truth until some last-act or even last-minute revelation, but if the game is played well by seemingly intelligent characters, we at least can admire how the filmmakers have pulled the wool over our eyes. We kind of want that, actually. To be fooled by an elaborate ruse that plays fair with its characters and its established rules—even when we're trying to figure out the various angles and moves being played—doesn't make us feel foolish. It can, though, make us glad that we weren't as clever as the people behind the game, if only for the satisfaction of watching the pieces fall neatly into place.

Besson, on the other hand, doesn't even give himself an opportunity to play fair. We're immediately placed within a massive assault by the Soviet government against American intelligence assets in Moscow. It's 1985 when every single spy for the United States is either detained or assassinated, and before we can register the consequences of such an event, it's suddenly 1990. The prologue, as it turns out, means very little to the story, except that it becomes a convenient excuse later in the story. It's almost as if the sequence exists simply to have some action at the top, and Besson found a way to retroactively make it mean something.

There's a lot of that going around here. We meet Anna (Sasha Luss), working in a street market in Moscow when a modelling agent from Paris discovers her. He recruits her immediately, and Anna is off to Paris, where she becomes a major success and gains two lovers: One is fellow model Maud (Lera Abova), and the other is a man who, one scene after he's introduced, will be dead—murdered by Anna in a hotel room.

At this point, the movie reveals the whole of its method and purpose, as the story flashes back three years to explain how Anna was a drug addict, living with an abusive and criminal boyfriend. Just as the agent discovered her in the market (which turns out to be entirely a setup instead of coincidence), Alex (Luke Evans) shows up in her apartment to recruit her to the KGB (She had applied to join the navy—on a laptop that, like all of the technology on display here, looks as if it's from 10 years ago instead of 30 or more).

Her handler is Olga (Helen Mirren), a veteran of the intelligence organization, who puts her through a devious test that becomes of the movie's few, tedious action sequences. She kills an astounding number of people in a restaurant, using their guns, their knives, and a rail from the bar.

This explains why Anna performs the previous/later murder in the most basic of terms: She's a killer for the KGB who kills whomever she is told to. From that point on, the screenplay does the same routine over and over—showing us some shocking moment and then backtracking to show the most basic details of why it happened. The most that's revealed about Anna is that she wants her freedom. The most that's revealed about Olga is that she doesn't trust her new asset, and the most that can be said about Alex and Lenny (Cillian Murphy), a CIA man in Paris who thinks she could help an agency mission in Moscow, is that they love her for the pure convenience of a very convenient plot.

There is a logic to everything that transpires, but does that really matter when the events are as familiar and dull—and the technique for revealing them are as repetitive and ultimately predictable—as they are here? Anna is more a template for the concept of a spy thriller than an actual one.

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