La Femme Nikita (1990)

La Femme Nikita (the original French title is simply Nikita) is a 1990 spy thriller written and directed by Luc Besson but there’s a whole lot more going on in this movie.

Nikita (Anne Parillaud) runs with a street gang. They’re violent murderous thugs. Nikita is vicious and she’s a mess. After a robbery goes wrong she’s facing a life sentence for murder. Then she gets a second chance. She’s a dangerous psychotic but she’s good at killing people and she kills with hesitation or remorse. The government can always use people like that. She is given the chance to work for a government intelligence agency as an assassin.

She isn’t really given a choice.

The idea is far from original. It’s the basis for the greatest TV spy series of all time, Callan. Callan is the world’s worst soldier but he’s very good at killing. He is recruited as an assassin for the British Government. Like Nikita he accepts because he has no other options.

A great movie does not have to be based on an original idea. The best stories are very rarely original. The trick to making a great movie (and La Femme Nikita is a great movie) is to take an old idea and tell it well and give it some fresh twists. That’s what Besson does here.

Bob (Tchéky Karyo) has the job of training Nikita. It’s a challenge. Nikita does not like being told what to do. She has plenty of potential. She’s a natural killer. Eventually she is ready for a mission.

The movie follows her on several missions. This is a movie that can be approached as an action thriller and on that level it’s very good indeed. It has plenty of adrenalin-rush action scenes. It has plenty of suspense.

This is also however the story of a woman. A complicated woman. She becomes more complicated. While she’s learning to be an agent she is also learning to be a woman. She is learning to enjoy being a woman.

She is also learning that she wants things that other women want. She falls in love. Marco (Jean-Hugues Anglade) is a seriously nice guy. They would like to get married.

The problem is whether Nikita can have a normal life with a normal relationship with a man while also earning her living killing people. It’s not just the practical difficulties of keeping her two lives separate. She also has to deal with the fact that she kills people she has never met, people she has nothing against, simply because the government orders her to to do so. The government has turned her into a killing machine but human beings are not machines.

There are very obvious echoes of A Clockwork Orange. The government dealing with people who are seen as social problems by re-engineering their personalities.

And there is the same moral ambiguity. We come to feel sympathy for Alex in A Clockwork Orange but he is a vicious thug. Does that mean he no longer has the right to be himself? Does that give the government the right to change his personality? We come to feel sympathy for Nikita, but she was a vicious killer.

At the start of the movie Nikita is a 19-year-old juvenile delinquent who kills by instinct. She is not much more than a wild animal. It’s doubtful that she has ever given a second’s thought to this. Now she is a woman. She has grown up. But is murdering people for the government more moral than just murdering by instinct? Perhaps it is worse. Nikita has become a killer who is capable of thinking about what she does.

I like the fact that she is not a perfect killing machine. She cannot function that way. As a killing machine she develops malfunctions. At one point when things go wrong on a mission she just curls up in a corner sobbing. She has not only developed feelings, she has come to value her own life. She is now capable of experiencing fear, and panic.

Anne Parillaud is extraordinary. She manages, quite subtly, to get across to us that Nikita is not a whole new person. She now dresses exquisitely but she is not really a super-confident sophisticated woman of the world. This is just a mask that she wears. She is not really an ice-cold professional killer. This is just another mask that she wears. The messed-up juvenile delinquent is still there underneath. And the frightened confused little girl that she once was is still there underneath as well. So we’re seeing an actress playing a woman who is herself like an actress playing a part.

Jean-Hugues Anglade is extremely well. Bob is a swine who manipulates Nikita but he is perhaps not entirely a machine either. He may feel some emotional attachment to Nikita. We’re not quite sure. Perhaps he is not sure either. A spy’s life is based on lies and deception. Sometimes they can no longer separate the lies from the reality and can no longer distinguish between the masks they wear and the person underneath.

Luc Besson was associated with the so-called “Cinéma du look” movement. Any accusation that Besson favours style over substance can be dismissed in the case of La Femme Nikita. It has plenty of style and plenty of substance. It’s a superior thriller but it’s also a complex look at the life of a complex woman. Very highly recommended.

Body of Evidence (1992)

Body of Evidence is a 1992 erotic thriller. 

The 90s was the decade of erotic thrillers. Critics generally responded to the genre with hostility. The idea of treating sex in a grown-up intelligent provocative way did not appeal to them. It’s perhaps not surprising that Body of Evidence was savaged by critics. Roger Ebert hated this movie and I generally find that I love any movie that Ebert hated.

Much of the hostility was directed towards the film’s star, Madonna. It was assumed that this was essentially a vanity project for her.

This movie’s main problem is that it is too obviously a Basic Instinct rip-off and it came out much too soon after the release of Verhoeven’s classic. Another major problem is that Madonna is just not in the same acting league as Sharon Stone. In Basic Instinct Sharon Stone keeps us guessing all the way through. Madonna is just a little bit too obvious.

It starts in Portland, Oregon with a rich old guy having sex with Rebecca (Madonna). It’s great sex but it’s the last sex he’ll ever have. He promptly dies of a heart attack. Cocaine is found in his bloodstream.

The D.A. Robert Garrett (Joe Mantegna) decides to charge Rebecca with murder. Her body was the murder weapon. This is the main plotting problem. The idea that you could get a murder conviction against a woman for being too good in bed stretches credibility to breaking point. The cocaine evidence is problematic from the start. Even the D.A. doesn’t think he can prove Rebecca gave the guy the cocaine.

Even the fact that it was kinky sex, involving handcuffs, is unlikely to make a conviction a possibility. So the central plot device is the sort of thing that seems wildly far-fetched even in a movie.

Naturally Rebecca’s lawyer Frank Dulaney (Willem Dafoe) gets a bit too obsessed with her.

Frank is happily married but Rebecca introduces him to the world of kinky sex and he likes it.

There are a lot of courtroom scenes and courtroom scenes are always a problem. There’s no way of getting around the fact that such scenes are talk talk talk.

The court case could go either way as both sides spring surprises.

It’s a movie that looks good. Rebecca’s houseboat is wonderful - I want it. And it’s the sort of home that a woman like Rebecca would choose.

Madonna is not terrible by any means but she doesn’t have the acting chops to make Rebecca as mysterious and ambiguous as she needs to be. And of course her performance was always going to be unfavourably compared to Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct and that was always going to be a problem because Stone is simply a much better actress. Madonna cannot match the subtlety and complexity of Stone’s performance.

To be fair, Sharon Stone had a much better script to work with. Madonna does her best and she’s generally reasonably good.

Starring Madonna in an erotic thriller was by no means a bad idea but it would have worked a whole lot better if the movie hadn’t been so similar to Basic Instinct. It would have been fairer to Madonna to put her in an entirely different sort of erotic thriller.

Willem Dafoe is OK but he also faces the problem that his performance is inevitably going to be compared to Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct. I wouldn’t say that Douglas is the better actor but he was a better fit for his role and he was playing a much more complex and more interesting character.

Brad Mirman’s script is the movie’s chief weakness. The central idea is too silly and the motivations of the two main characters are too straightforward. The dialogue also lacks zing.

There’s plenty of fairly explicit sex and things do get quite steamy. The sex scenes are done quite well, Madonna is certainly uninhibited and they provide welcome relief from the talky courtroom scenes.

Body of Evidence was a box-office disappointment and has never really gained much respect.

It sounds like I hated Body of Evidence but I didn’t. It’s a perfectly serviceable 90s erotic thriller. It’s entertaining, it’s sexy, Madonna is fine and she has charisma. It’s not in the league as movies like Basic Instinct and The Last Seduction, or even Sliver and Jade, all of which have a lot more going on and are more multi-layered and ambiguous. As a second-tier erotic thriller Body of Evidence is recommended.

The Blu-Ray looks great. The pick of the extras is Kim Newman’s video essay on 90s erotic thrillers.

Dinosaur Island (1994)

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The 10th Victim (1965)

Elio Petri’s The 10th Victim was released in 1965 but even if you didn’t know that I think you’d have no trouble guessing that it must have been made sometime between around 1965 and 1967. It has that mid-60s euro vibe in spades.

It’s set in the future. Social order is maintained by offering the populace legalised regulated violence in the form of the Big Hunt. If you sign up for this you participate in ten hunts, five as victim and five as hunter. In the unlikely even that you survive all ten you receive fabulous riches and of course fame and adulation.

The idea of social control by means of violence as entertainment has been used many times in science fiction movies, notable examples being Rollerball, The Running Man, Lucio Fulci’s Warriors of the Year 2072 (1984) and to a lesser extent Turkey Shoot (1982). But The 10th Victim marks the real beginning of this sub-genre.

Marcello Poletti (Marcello Mastroianni) and Caroline Meredith (Ursula Andress) are both getting close to successful completing their ten hunts. Now Caroline is to be the huntress and Marcello the victim. The twist is that in the Big Hunt the hunter is given complete information about his victim while the victim has no idea of the identity of the hunter coming after him.

Caroline has been following Marcello about but while it has crossed his mind that she is the assigned huntress he cannot be sure. If he could be certain he could kill her. The victim has every right to kill the hunter. But there’s another twist. If he kills an innocent person by mistake he will face a long prison term. That adds a lot of interest to the plot. Even if the victim, in this case Marcello, is 98% sure of the identity of the huntress he can’t take the risk of killing her. He has to be 100% sure.

Marcello operates a sideline, a kind of religious cult known as the Sunsetters. This was going well until their meetings started being disrupted by violent bands of enraged neorealists.

There’s plenty of flirting going on between Caroline and Marcello. She may just be toying with her prey. She might also feel some sexual attraction towards him. He might be attracted to her. But they’re both experienced participants in the Big Hunt which means they’re experts in deception.

There is of course also the possibility that they’re not sure about their own feelings.

I don’t honestly think this movie has any political axe to grind. It takes swipes at both oppressive governments and corrupt capitalists. This is a dystopian future but it’s not a stereotypical left-wing or right-wing dystopia. In fact it’s a lot more like the actual world we live in in 2024. It certainly takes a few satirical swipes at the worlds of advertising and entertainment.

I shudder to think of the ways in which critics and film scholars of today would try to read the ideological obsessions of the 2020s into this movie. This movie is much more an exercise in style and pop artiness than any sort of political film.

At this period no Italian filmmaker was capable of making a non-stylish movie but this one really has style to burn. And imagination.

What makes this movie so very 1965 is that it’s a heady mix of pop culture and art. What also makes it very 1965 is its willingness to get seriously crazy and surreal. This is not just a futuristic world. It’s a world of wild fantasy, both aesthetically and in plot terms.

It’s also a genre mash-up. This is a science fiction movie and a thriller and an offbeat romantic comedy. While this movie is not based on a comic book this was a period at which a slight comic-book feel was starting to become apparent in both British and European movies.

Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress are sexy and charismatic. Andress gets to wear some very cool glamorous sexy outfits, and she knows how to wear them.

The 10th Victim is a wild crazy ride and it’s very highly recommended.

The Blue Underground Blu-Ray looks terrific.

I've also reviewed the novel, Robert Sheckley's The 10th Victim.

The Rocketeer (1991)

The Rocketeer, directed by Joe Johnston, is a 1991 Disney science fiction-adventure movie, from the days when Disney made movies that were worth seeing.

It’s based on the popular graphic novel series of the same name created by Dave Stevens in 1982. Stevens was apparently a bit disappointed by Disney’s sanitised film adaptation. Stevens was heavily influenced by the movie serials of the 30s and 40s and that influence is also obvious in the movie.

It is Los Angeles in 1938. Young stunt pilot Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell) hopes to become national air racing champion. His aircraft is a replica of the famous real-life GeeBee racing monoplane. Cliff is test flying the aircraft while on the ground a bunch of crooks are being pursued by the F.B.I. and the crooks take a few potshots of Cliff’s plane. The plane crashes and Cliff’s dreams are in ruins.

Until he discovers something hidden in a hangar. It’s what the crooks were after. Cliff and his pal and mentor Peevy (Alan Arkin) don’t know what it is at first. Then they discover it’s a rocket backpack.

Of course they should notify the Feds immediately but Cliff figures it wouldn’t do any harm to borrow the rocket suit just for a while. He has the idea he could make a lot of money with it at air shows.

Cliff doesn’t know that the rocket suit was invented by eccentric aviation genius Howard Hughes. Hughes fears that the military will try to use his invention as a weapon (and of course he’s right). Hughes doesn’t care if the rocket pack is destroyed, he just doesn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. The Government however wants to get the rocket pack back and the F.B.I. are determined to find it.

There is of course a nefarious villain who also wants the rocket backpack invention, for purposes of evil. He has employed a gang of hoods to get hold of it. They were the ones who stole the device in the first place.

The super-villain is in fact a famous Hollywood actor, Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton).

Poor Cliff has everybody after him. People keep trying to shoot him. His girlfriend Jenny (Jennifer Connelly) is also in danger - kidnapping her would be a very obvious way to force Cliff to hand over the rocket pack.

The plot is actually the sort of plot you find in those classic 1930s/40s serials. We’re not supposed to take this movie seriously. This is pure outrageous fun.

Billy Campbell is a slightly colourless hero but then he is supposed to be just a regular naïve young guy hopelessly out of his depth. Jennifer Connelly isn’t called on to do much more than look pretty and be likeable and she does both those things successfully.

Timothy Dalton clearly understood exactly what was required of him. He plays Sinclair as a melodrama villain. He doesn’t actually twirl his moustache in a sinister fashion but you know he wants to. His performance works especially well given that he’s playing a character who is supposed to be an outrageously hammy actor who specialises in melodramas. Dalton is having a lot of fun here. He’s a joy to watch.

The revelation of his evil master plan is exactly what you expect in a movie serial or a comic strip.

The effects are very well done. We get treated to air races, plane crashes, vintage aircraft, a zeppelin(!) and of course the rocket man himself. There are also car chases, fistfights and shoot-outs.

And naturally, a pretty heroine in peril.

The action climax is as spectacular and outlandish as one could hope for.

This is very much “family entertainment” but it looks great and there’s lots of breathless excitement. A fun feelgood movie and sometimes that’s just what the doctor ordered. Highly recommended.

Disney’s Blu-Ray looks very nice.

Dick Tracy (1990)

I have to start my review of Warren Beatty’s 1990 Dick Tracy movie with a disclaimer. I’ve seen several of the 1940s Dick Tracy B-movies and a couple of the 1930s serials but I have no familiarity at all with Chester Gould’s comic strip. I therefore can’t way how close this movie goes to capturing the spirit of the comic strip. It certainly tries very hard for a comic-strip feel but whether it’s consistent with that particular comic strip I can’t say.

Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty) is of course a square-jawed tough guy police detective in an imaginary American city. Tracy is a popular hero in the city.

There’s plenty of organised crime in the city and now Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino) is trying to create a unified crime operation that will more or less run the whole town. His first step is to take over Lips Manlis’s night-club/gambling club. That means he also takes over Manlis’s girlfriend, sexy blonde canary Breathless Mahoney (Madonna).

Now it’s going to be all-out war between Dick Tracy and Big Boy. Much mayhem will ensue.

The mayhem is done with energy and style. There are quite a few explosions but in 1990 there was no way you were going to get away with an action movie without explosions. Millions of rounds of small arms ammunition are expended, resulting in very little actual bloodshed. Dick Tracy’s submachine gun seems to be fitted with a 10,000 round magazine. It all adds to the comic-book style fun.

Tracy has a girlfriend, Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly). Tess is pure and virtuous.

Needless to say at some stage Tess is going to get herself kidnapped by the bad guys.

Dick Tracy will also have to choose between the virtuous Good Girl and the sexy Bad Girl. Breathless Mahoney is the femme fatale and she’s definitely a bad girl but she might have genuinely fallen in love with Tracy.

There’s a complication. It’s not just a war between Dick Tracy and Big Boy. There’s a third party, a man with no face, and he seems intent on destroying both Tracy and Big Boy.

The plot feels like a comic-strip plot, which is a good thing. It does have a major romance sub-plot, a romantic triangle between Tracy, Tess and Breathless Mahoney, but in 1990 a romance sub-plot would have been commercially essential.

Glenne Headly has what is in some ways the toughest role. Not only is Tess Trueheart the pure virtuous Good Girl, she’s the least flamboyant character in the movie and of course she’s inevitably going to be totally overshadowed by Madonna in full-on Wicked Sex Kitten mode. Glenne Headly does at least manage to make Tess likeable.

Full marks for Charlie Korsmo for making Kid one of the less obnoxious and irritating child characters in movies. Junior (as he later becomes known) can be incredibly annoying in the 1930s serial but here he’s actually quite likeable.

This is the first time I have ever enjoyed an Al Pacino performance. Pacino goes wildly over-the-top (as he always does) but here it works.

I hate to say this but I really liked Madonna in this movie. She nails her part pretty well. She makes Breathless Mahoney ambiguous enough to be interesting (she might stick with the bad guys or throw in her lot with the good guys). And she convinces us that Breathless really is confused about her feelings for Dick Tracy.

I like Warren Beatty a lot here. Dick Tracy is not supposed to be a real person. He’s a square-jawed Comic Strip Hero. He’s not supposed to emote. That’s now Beatty plays him and it works.

The best thing about this movie is the visual style. Given that he’s the star, the producer and the director I’m guessing that Warren Beatty had a great deal of creative control and that the visual style is exactly what he wanted. If so then his instincts were correct. All the colours are impossibly bright and vivid. Everything looks totally and wildly and deliberately artificial. It looks like a comic-strip come to life, and the impressive makeup effects make the characters look like comic-strip characters come to life. That’s as it should be. Beatty makes zero concessions to realism, and that is again as it should be.

What I love most is that this movie looks nothing at all like Tim Burton’s Batman. It has its own visual style.

Stephen Sondheim’s songs work well. A soundtrack of modern pop songs would have dated the movie very quickly and would have felt wrong. Even though the songs are sung by Madonna they feel more like standards than current chart-toppers, and Madonna sings then well.

I enjoyed Dick Tracy very much indeed. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed three of the very good RKO movies - Dick Tracy (1945), Dick Tracy vs Cueball (1946) and Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947) and I’ve reviewed the hugely entertaining 1937 Dick Tracy serial.

Species (1995)

Species is a 1995 science fiction/horror/monster movie and it seems to be mostly dismissed as being a rather schlocky riff on Alien/Aliens. That’s a little bit unfair as we will see.

The real-life S.E.T.I. (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) projects have for decades been sending out engraved invitations to any advanced life forms out there in the galaxy to come and invade the Earth. It’s a bit like sending out cards to every known burglar in the country letting them know that as far as you’re concerned your home is their home.

In this movie in 1993 an alien civilisation responds to these messages. The response is in the form of instructions on how to do some really cool genetic manipulations. Naturally scientists, led by Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), decide to try out these experiments. What could go wrong? If you can’t trust aliens from an unknown extraterrestrial civilisation on an unknown planet who can you trust? The U.S. Government naturally funds the project.

The result of the project is a little girl who becomes known as Sil. She looks like any normal twelve-year-old girl which is a bit concerning since she’s only a few months old. Sil also seems to be faster and more powerful than a normal twelve-year-old girl. The scientists are afraid of her. When they get really afraid of her they decide to kill her. They describe it as “terminating the project” which sounds so much nicer than murdering a child.

Sil’s execution by lethal gas is the opening scene of the movie but Sil escapes. Now she must be hunted down and destroyed. That proves to be quite a challenge.

Fitch assembles a team of four for the hunt. There are two scientists, Dr Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina) and Dr Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger). There’s Dan (Forest Whitaker), an unstable empath who seems to have various extra-sensory power. And there’s a government assassin, Preston Lennox (Michael Madsen).

Sil has grown up fast. She now looks like a gorgeous 20-year-old blonde woman (and is now played by Natasha Henstridge). Sil is confused but she has a strong survival instinct and she’s half-human while the other half is an alien predator.

Sil also has a strong instinct to reproduce. That’s what really scares Fitch. He has no idea how many offspring she can produce and how quickly she can do it. She has to be destroyed before she can breed.

This is a movie that you need to think about. On the surface it’s a monster movie with government agents hunting down a monster from outer space. But the more you think about it the more nuanced it becomes. Sil is not necessarily an evil monster as such, and her hunters are perhaps not quite the uncomplicated good guys they seem to be.

It’s important to note that the government scientists start trying to kill Sil before she ever tries to kill anyone. And although she ends up killing lots of people from her point of view she is killing in self-defence. Sometimes her ideas of self-defence are a little pro-active - she sometimes kills people who are merely potential threats. But to her they are very real potential threats. And the decision to hunt her down and destroy her is also made before she has killed anybody.

She just scares these scientists a lot, so the safest thing is to kill her.

Sil is only half-human. Her non-human half is animal-like, driven purely by the natural instinct to survive and to reproduce. Expecting moral judgments from her is like expecting a lion to agonise over the ethical implications of eating zebras, or expecting a tigress to consider the moral dimensions of killing in order to protect her cubs.

Fitch is a character with a little bit of depth. He thinks of himself as a rational man whose mind is never clouded by emotion, a man capable of taking tough decisions. He is however not as sure of himself as he seems to be. He cries when he orders Sil’s execution. He is also a lot more frightened than he’ll admit, and he’s also aware that he has screwed up pretty badly. Ben Kingley does a pretty good in the role, giving us hints that Fitch is only just holding himself together.

When judging Natasha Henstridge’s performance you have to remember that her character is not a woman. She is only half-human, and her human half is both intelligent and child-like. And totally unsocialised. She has to come across as not quit human and Miss Henstridge does a fine job of getting that across.

H.R. Giger did the monster design work, in his characteristic amazing style.

Species is an interestingly deceptive movie. You can enjoy it as a straight-out monster-hunting movie but there’s some subtlety and ambiguity there if you care to look for them. This is a monster who is very scared. I liked this movie a great deal. Highly recommended.

Species looks terrific on Blu-Ray.