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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Blu-ray: 
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
