Anna

[Besson is] riffing on spy movies and their inherent double crosses and triple crosses, stopping just short of parody but letting the audience in on the trick. And thanks to Besson and a willing cast, the trick's a pretty good one.

What ultimately sinks the film is its overwhelming blandness, from the lack of creativity employed in Anna's many kills to Besson's inability to choreograph a pulse-racing action scene...

But unlike Besson's bugnuts, energetically dopey Scarlett Johansson vehicle Lucy, Anna is more invested in winking at the audience than being fun.

Watching Anna brings with it a profound sense of déjà vu. If only anything else about it was profound.

Luc Besson's Anna subsists by imitating better contemporaries (Atomic Blonde, namely) and wrapping up all of its convoluted plotting and boring sex scenes with a faux-feminist bow.

The gunplay in Anna grows repetitive before long, and the heroine's invincibility feels like a cheap substitute for the power that Besson wields over her.

Anna is a guilty pleasure, delivering just enough cheese/sleaze to satisfy a viewer’s baser instincts but wrapping it all up in a clever storytelling style that keeps us on our toes and guessing.

Besson’s new film is an overly smug repackaging of his most acclaimed work, La Femme Nikita.

Watching Anna, one imagines that director Luc Besson saw both Atomic Blonde (2017) and Red Sparrow (2018) and then decided to put his spin on the beautiful Russian spy movie.

An auteur tackling a genre movie with aplomb.