Nikita

DVDfever.co.uk – Nikita Blu-ray review Dom Robinson reviews

Nikita A new kind of lethal weapon. Distributed by
Optimum Home Entertainment Blu-ray:
DVD:

• Cert:
• Running time: 118 minutes
• Year: 1990
• Released: September 2009
• Region(s): 2, PAL
• Chapters: 12 plus extras
• Picture: 1080p High Definition
• Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0
• Languages: English
• Subtitles: English
• Widescreen: 2.35:1 (Technovision)
• 16:9-Enhanced: Yes
• Macrovision: Yes
• Disc Format: BD50
• Price: £24.99 (Blu-ray); £15.99 (DVD)
• Extras: The Making of Nikita, Trailer, Five mini-featurettes
• Vote and comment on this film: View Comments
  

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  Director:

  Luc Besson

  (Angel-A, Arthur and the Invisibles, Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard, Arthur and the Two Worlds War, Atlantis, The Big Blue, The Fifth Element, The Last Combat, Leon, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, Nikita, Subway)

Producer:

Patrice Ledoux

Screenplay:

Luc Besson

Music:

Eric Serra

Cast :

Nikita: Anne Parillaud
Bob: Tchéky Karyo
Marco: Jean-Hugues Anglade
Amanda: Jeanne Moreau
Victor the cleaner: Jean Reno

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Nikita hasn’t had a great start in life…

Once a drug addict, she’s sent to jail after a failed pharmacy robbery results in her blowing the head off a cop.

And so begins the story of Nikita (Anna Parillaud). She isn’t someone you can just slap with an asbo and hope everything will be alright – she requires specialist treatment, aka life imprisonment with a 30-year minimum term. And that’s just the good news she’s been given. The bad news is that they’ve changed their minds and, instead, they’re going to give her a fatal injection. D’oh!

Well, not quite, since if they really did that then we’d have a very short film. Hence, Nikita wakes up in an all-white room and in enters a man who goes by the name of Uncle Bob (Tchéky Karyo), who tells her that she’s not actually in heaven, but is alive and legally dead, at which point he shows her pictures of her funeral. She has a chance to be reformed and turned into an assassin, working on behalf of the government. If she turns them down, then she really will end up in that plot of land…

But it’s not all work, work, work. After a prolonged bout of training, and a brief cameo from Jeanne Moreau as Amanda – who just helps give Nikita a bit of style in the wig department (and it’s a fairly pointless role to boot), 3 years on she’s treated to a birthday dinner out of the facility, which is the first time in a long time that she’s seen daylight. Except, part-way through dinner, there’s a catch: this is actually her first proper assignment and she has to assassinate someone and then escape through the kitchen – a classic movie scene.

Halfway through the film, she gets out and back into society, with aspirations to be a normal human being for the first time. She even manages to get a boyfriend, Marco (Jean-Hugues Anglade), but one day, business comes a-calling…

Overall, Nikita is bloody marvellous film and another of Luc Besson’s triumphs and also has a great cameo from Jean Reno as Victor, the cleaner (aka, also a professional assassin), a role he effectively continued four years later in the titular role of Leon.

There’s only one thing wrong with this film, though: 3 years later it spawned the dire Hollywood remake, Point of No Return, aka The Assassin, starring Bridget Fonda and directed by John Badham.

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For the most part, the picture is nicely detailed throughout and reflects well Luc Besson’s sharp eye for direction, filling the image with his 2.35:1 anamorphic vision, whether it’s the close-ups of any of the key cast’s faces or the glorious Paris and Venice locations. Like the Subway release, there’s occasionally some shimmering that’s mostly notable in the black sections of the image, while at other times it just looks a rather hazy print. It doesn’t happen as often as in Subway but it does make me wonder why it’s there. For the record, I’m watching on a Panasonic 37″ Plasma screen via a Samsung BD-P1500 Blu-ray player.

The sound is in Dolby Digital 2.0 and sounds great for the Eric Serra’s intense soundtrack, while dialogue and ambience are also fine, but it’s a shame there’s no DTS 5.1 mix which would’ve been perfect for the kitchen shootout.

The extras are as follows:

• The Making of Nikita (20:37): Like most of the featurettes here, this was filmed in 2003 and is presented in 4:3 with letterboxed 2.35:1 film clips and features chat from key cast and crew members – in this case talking about the how the filming panned out for each of them. The only one I’m surprised we don’t get any input from is Besson, himself. Aside from that, it’s a fairly standard supplmental. As for Anne Parillaud, as she ages she’s looking hotter than ever.

• Karyo on Besson (0:26): Yes, I’ve not gone mad – this extra really did only last 26 seconds, while he praises Besson some more. And it took me longer to type this bit than he did to say it.

• The Sound of Nikita (4:48): A few minutes, mainly from Eric Serra, about the soundtrack and how he ensures it always applies to the moment and the feelings exhibited by the characters.

• The Bedroom (0:33): Er… she has different bedrooms throughout the film.

• The Training Room (0:33): This has nothing to do with the training room where she practiced self-defence, it’s just random clips of the film stuck together. How odd.

• The Vanity Room (0:33): She puts on a bit of make-up, for about 5 seconds of this brief clip-fest. The end. How pointless are these tiny segments?

• Trailer (2:22): In anamorphic 2.35:1.

The menu mixes footage from the film with a small portion of the thumping action music. There are English subtitles but the Chaptering is, again for Optimum, appalling with just 12 over the 118-minute running time.

Nikita is a fantastic film and a must-see, but while the Blu-ray image looks better than a DVD, it still could be improved, as mentioned earlier, both the extras and the lack of a DTS 5.1 soundtrack are quite a let-down.

FILM CONTENT
PICTURE QUALITY
SOUND QUALITY
EXTRAS


OVERALL Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2009.