This Nikita's Too Thin<br /><br />Unlike the `Nikita' (as in, former USSR premier) and, like it's leading lady, LA FEMME NIKITA is too thin to be as fully satisfying or thought provoking as it could have been. As written by Luc Besson and as played by Anne Parillaud , Nikita is a whiney, drug addicted psychopath who murders a police officer in cold blood, even though she has virtually no chance of escape. Even during incarceration, Nikita ruthlessly maims an interrogator. She is sentenced to life with no possibility of parole for 30 years.<br /><br />CAUTION: SPOILERS AHEAD.<br /><br />When Nikita finds herself being summarily executed by lethal injection, she cries out for her mama. This cowardly behavior was found repugnant in the days of Cagney and Bogart. Here, I suppose, it is suppose to arouse sympathy for Nikita. It doesn't work.<br /><br />Nikita awakes to find that her execution and burial has been staged, and her new mentor, Bob (Tchéky Karyo) recruits her for work as a spy / assasin. Bob gives her one hour to choose: Either work for us or be executed for real.<br /><br />Using a ruse, Nikita attacks Bob and, taking his weapon, uses Bob as a shield in an attempt to escape. When her plans are foiled, Nikita attempts suicide, but Bob has left the first chamber in his gun empty. Reclaiming his weapon, Bob shoots Nikita in the leg as a lesson. This is the first scene in the movie I actually enjoyed.<br /><br />Entering training, the cruel, unruly Nikita physically injures one trainer and emotionally injures another. Bob finds out from Nikita it is her TWENTIETH birthday. Bringing Nikita a cake, he tells her she has two weeks or she'll never see 21. Visiting her `feminity' instructor (Jeanne Moreau), Nikita begins to learn to use her feminine gifts. <br /><br />After finishing her makeup, throughout which Moreau says, `You are going to be very late!' Nikita goes to celebrate her TWENTY-THIRD birthday with Bob! After three years, the only apparent changes in Nikita are that she is slightly calmer (Ritalin?) and has learn to brush her teeth, comb her hair and apply makeup (your tax francs at work)<br /><br />Her birthday celebration outside the facility (which she hasn't left in three years), turns out to be an assassination in a public restaurant. This is the best action sequence in the movie (and Parillaud performs many of her own stunts). However, it seems pretty silly for an `expert' spy to leave a `novice' spy to commit this kind of mayhem in such a public place.<br /><br />It gets worse. Once Nikita escapes and returns to the spy compound, making no attempt to hide her tracks, Bob tells her that she is `free' and that the organization has set her up with a cover. Right, she has just slaughtered over a half dozen people in a public place and she is free to go settle down. What, is there no police force in France (I guess Nikita killed the last cop in the beginning). Nikita then becomes domesticated and settles in with a sweet boyfriend, Marco (Jean-Hugues Anglade). Things are going swimmingly for Nikita until the `nasty organization' asks her to do a few more jobs, each one more ridiculous than the rest. One asks us believe that Nikita could shoot a woman with a high powered rifle from her motel room and have no police come to investigate. The last would have us believe that Nikita dressed as as a male diplomat could ride through the gates of an embassy with a heavily armed hit man whom looks nothing like the real ambassador's driver without being questioned. It also asks us to believe a car can crash through a solid brick wall and keep on going.<br /><br />Near the end of the movie, Marco, whom has discovered whom Nikita is, debates with Bob about the moral equivalency of Nikita's assassinations of enemies of the state with her murder of the innocent cop. Some have argued this movie makes a strong statement against capital punishment. I disagree. Nikita may no longer be as rebellious, but she is every bit as dangerous at the end of the movie as she was at the beginning. She NEVER shows remorse for the cop's murder, and always seems only concerned about saving her own skin. Her only sacrifice seems to be abandoning the two men she loves. Will Nikita again become the foul, ruthless, drug-addicted `wild child' of the streets. The liberal conceit that `society made her that way' and that, "love and financial security will save her" fails to take into account the Robert Downey Juniors and O.J. Simpson's of the world. Certainly external forces DO shape us, but they don't make us whom we are. That kind of wooly-headed thinking is why so many FAVOR capital punishment. That is, in order to prevent nitwit social scientists from inflicting the same murderer on us TWICE. Besides, the organization would track down and kill Nikita to protect itself from exposure. Nikita would understand. After all, the organization would be playing by HER rules.<br /><br />This movie is wrong headed from the start. Luc Besson's trademark `flying dolly' opening shot into strutting drug-addicted criminals does not work here. Drug addicts, particularly those planning to rob a store would skulk, not strut. Thin stuff, indeed.<br /><br />