Tag: n

Nemesis 4

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★★★
“Bizarre, ultra-cheap, post-apocalypse fetish film for body-building fans.”

Though the lead actress, body-builder Sue Price, looks nothing like the cover pic (right), credit is due for choosing someone who defies conventional standards of female beauty. However, take all the points away, and then some, for pretending she does; having her spend half the film naked is something both Chris and I could very easily have lived without. She is, frankly, scary. That’s a shame, as while the budget here was obviously tiny, it’s put (mostly) to good use, with an interesting script.

The year is 2080, and Alex (Price) is a cyborg assassin on the verge of burn-out. When she kills the son of a mob boss on her final mission, she becomes the target – knowing escape is futile, she waits, tormented by visions of the Angel of Death. It’s all very talky, but is brisk enough to keep you occupied, and the location (my guess is somewhere in Slovakia) is great, a bombed-out, deserted city that’s very eerie. Also impressive is the freaky cyborg-sex, all orifices and mechanical devices, as if David Cronenberg was assistant director.

However, there’s no justification for Alex taking her clothes off every five minutes, except perhaps the nasty spikes that come out of her chest, which is slim excuse indeed. There’s also the lamest helicopter explosion I’ve seen, and huge amounts of irrelevant footage from (presumably) Nemesis 3, to get the running time up to 80 minutes. Still, this could have been a small gem, if only Price had stayed dressed – the cheapness often works for it. Just expect no action extravaganza, more a philosophical rumination on life and death. Albeit with lumpy breasts.

Dir: Albert Pyun
Star:

Sue Price, Blanka Copikova, Andrew Divoff, Michal Gucík

Nikita (film)

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★★★★½

nikitaLuc Besson’s original contains all the necessary elements which would become standard for the field. A criminal is “killed” by the government, only to be resurrected into a new life as an assassin for the authorities. Initially resistant, she eventually embraces her new life, but a romance reminds her of the world she left behind, and becomes a potentially lethal threat to her existence when it starts to interfere with her professional capabilities.

This kind of thing has been done so often since, in one form or another, it’s hard to remember how fresh and invigorating it seemed at the time. Even so, not many movies since have had the courage to make their heroine a junkie cop-killer, and it says a lot for both Parrilaud and Besson that Nikita still comes over as sympathetic. She’s a victim of circumstance, her only use to the state as a trained killer, but the film strongly makes the case that she remains a person, with feelings and emotions like the rest of us.

It is these that eventually prove her downfall, when she encounters Victor the cleaner (Jean Reno), and realises that he is what she will eventually become. Seeing him kill people, as easily as we would swat a fly, it’s clear that, no matter how lengthy her indoctrination and training, she still kept her essential humanity and there is a line she won’t cross. Mind you, the original ending was rather more explosive, with Nikita turning her skills to exact revenge on her creators. Whether through a lack of resources, or a desire for a less confrontational finale, this was dropped in favour of a softer, more ambivalent ending which was also copied by subsequent versions.

Though this might have been nice from an action heroine point of view – as is, you wonder why they bothered with all that specialized training – I’m more than prepared to settle for the actual version of the film. The performances are all sound, Parillaud’s in particular (her “singing” voice is a stroke of genius!), and Besson’s style shines through a bluish haze of raindrops, wet streets and car headlights. Avoid, at all costs, the English dubbed version: that’s what Point of No Return is for. Even if you can’t or won’t read subtitles, you will have little difficulty in understanding the film, such is the raw emotion the actors put into their portrayals.

At two hours long, there is perhaps a slight deficit of actual action, not least in comparison to the hyperkinetic pace of contemporary genre entries. Some facets of the film, such as the romance, seem overplayed, albeit largely because the actors get the significance over so well. However, it’s not as if you’ll find yourself looking at your watch, and – if you’ll pardon the pun – the execution here is almost flawless.

Dir: Luc Besson
Star: Anne Parillaud, Tcheky Karyo, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Jeanne Moreau