ANNA: An Empty, Convoluted Spy Thriller

Stylized action-thrillers are not too hard to come by in our current cinematic landscape. Just look at recent films like the John Wick series, Red Sparrow, Polar, Atomic Blonde…the list goes on. With such an overflow of similarly-minded films, it’s sometimes hard to stand out amongst the crowd.

Amusingly, Anna actually does distinguish itself, but not necessarily in the best way. As opposed to just telling its story in a standard narrative fashion, it instead skips around, filling in the full picture little by little until the final image is revealed in its closing moments. It’s clever, but to a fault, and that is ultimately Anna‘s downfall.

Structural Convolution

Anna begins when a mysteriously beautiful woman named Anna (Sasha Luss) is hired as a model. She seems a natural at the job, quickly becoming one of the most well-known models in the business. She soon becomes attached to a high-ranking government agent. But little do we know (at least, as of now) her true intentions, until it is suddenly made clear.

After this, the film jumps back, filling in the gaps leading up to that moment. We follow Anna here, seeing her growth in that time, only to have yet another noticeable gap missing in the story. A sudden twist is presented, and the film again jumps back, filling us in up until this moment. If you’re frustrated yet, hang on tight. After about the fourth or fifth “Six months ago” title card, I was audibly groaning.

What Anna most reminded me of, strangely enough, is the film The Handmaiden. That movie similarly jumps forward and backwards in time, leaving out important pieces of information until it all comes together in the end. Yet, where Anna differs is in the person telling the story. Besson, despite ambitiously telling a back-and-forth narrative, forgot to make us actually care about the characters or their endeavors along the way. Park Chan-wook, this is not.

The Female Spy Thriller

Spy thrillers which star a woman in the lead role are getting more common in recent years, such as with last year’s Red Sparrow or the prior year’s Atomic Blonde. It’s admirable to see a genre which has typically been populated with men see women get a chance to shine. Yet, these movies are sometimes controversial at the same time, oversexualizing the title characters or showing how their manipulations are typically their only source of power. Thankfully, Anna does at least give its protagonist the brains to match her beauty, showing how she is always two steps ahead of her surrounding companions (using, unfortunately, the a bit on-the-nose metaphor that she excels at the game of chess).

But what Anna does not succeed at portraying is much personality for its character as well. Anna herself, though played rather well by newcomer Sasha Luss, doesn’t have much going for her other than the objectified traits mentioned above, which are all in pursuit of her desire for freedom from being an assassin. But besides her manipulations, much of what we see about the character can be summed up by a series of vacant stares. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, since director Luc Besson is not particularly well-known for his strong female characters. Leeloo from The Fifth Element or Lucy from Lucy are much the same; not much more than eye-candy for the audience to look at.

Supporting Characters

It doesn’t help matters that the supporting characters of Anna are similarly empty. Luke Evans and Cillian Murphy are not much more than generically handsome KGB and CIA officers, respectively, yet they also seem to be taking such a silly story a bit too seriously at times. Lera Abova plays an additional love interest of Anna, but we don’t get to know much about her despite initially appearing to be someone Anna actually cares for.

Easily the most developed and watchable of the bunch is the character of Olga, a high-ranking member of the KGB, played by the always wonderful Helen Mirren. Mirren plays the character with just the right amount of sly self-awareness, chewing the scenery and appearing to be having a lot of fun doing so as well. If only the remainder of the film’s characters were similarly portrayed.

Stylized Action, But it’s Not Enough

With a film like Anna, though, it’s likely the style that you came here to see, the action in particular. But even here, Anna comes up short. Due to the film being a more straightforward spy thriller, you miss out on the spectacularly otherwordly visual effects that Besson has brought to past films like The Fifth Element and even Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Instead, the action is closer to something like Leon: The Professional: blurs of motion, hyper-violent, and with anything and everything being used as a weapon.

There are a few sequences that are impressively executed in this way, such as a dinner assassination gone awry, and the film’s climactic escape scene, in which Anna relentlessly takes out everyone in her path. Yet, they still fall short in comparison to something like the John Wick series, and even the best sequences fade from memory when the film starts to drag in its slower in-between moments. Essentially, the action just does not have enough energy to revive what is otherwise a lethargically empty film.

Conclusion: Anna

To conclude, Anna just isn’t quite the fun thrill ride that one might have hoped for. It’s uniquely organized, telling its story through a series of flashbacks and flashforwards, but it’s an aspect that gets wearied and overused as it goes on. In addition, there just isn’t much else holding Anna together, with a majority of its characters being devoid of personality, and even the action, which you would expect to be the film’s selling point, falling short. Basically, if you’re on the hunt for an interesting, inventive spy thriller, keep looking.

What did you think of Anna? Are you a fan of Luc Besson’s recent films? Let us know in the comments below! 

Anna was released in theaters in the US on June 21, 2019 and will be released in the UK on July 5, 2019.