Anna Movie Review

Anna (2019)

Rent Anna on Amazon Video
Written by: Luc Besson (screenplay) 
Directed by: Luc Besson
Starring: Sasha Luss, Helen Mirren, Luke Evans, Cillian Murphy
Rated: R
Watch the trailer

Plot
Beneath Anna's striking beauty lies a secret that will unleash her indelible strength and skill to become one of the world's most feared government assassins.

Verdict
The timeline jumps around a lot, which I thought was a mask for the lack of plot but by the end the jumping around really comes into it's own and adds to the story. This is better than Besson's recent output, though not on the Taken level.  Luss does a nice job in her first leading role, and this has some nice action sequences.
It depends.

Review
This follows Besson's lackluster over the top sci-fi spectacle Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and disappointing action romp Lucy. I was hoping for an improvement over Lucy and I definitely got that.

Initially this feels like Atomic Blonde without the '80s style. This movie jumps five years into the future after the first scene, jumps back a few months, jumps forward. It's not difficult to keep up with but I wasn't sure why it was necessary. It takes far too long for this movie to get into a groove. By the end I liked the time jumps. It plays into the mystery and setup the spies are implementing, becoming a boon to the story. Nothing is quite what it seems and the movie peels back those layers.

Anna is a spy and so much of what we see in the beginning has an additional layer later seen. She's very good at her job, but she's tried of being forced to work as an assassin. With no way out, she becomes despondent. An assassin isn't a job from which one generally gets to retire.

Her first assignment has a neat feature where her bosses give her a gun that she later discovers isn't loaded. When she complains after she's chided for not checking her tools before embarking on the mission. It's a great way to test her skills and it results in a great, and brutal, action sequence.

The movie is gratuitous. Anna is a model, which isn't bad on it's own, but there didn't seem to be much point to Anna sleeping with her American and Russian handlers other than to generate sex scenes.

Anna desires freedom. She wants out of her various forms of imprisonment. Her prior life, her job as an agent, she's always wanted out. It's that desire that drives her. She brings everyone in the movie together to achieve that end. This has a tidy ending, but that isn't a bad thing.