This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Russian Doll
Plot Overview
Moscow 1985. Anna Poliatova (Sasha Luss) is love slave to a Slavic lowlife beast from whom she longs to break free. She applies to the Soviet Navy who are impressed by her background & language skills, and in person by her uncommon good looks. She's recruited by the KGB as a “blank key” that may fit any lock, and she accepts this fresh start under the protection of her recruiter Alex Tchenkov (Luke Evans.) Her handler is the dragon Olga (Helen Mirren) who routinely loses agents, the way she treats them.
Anna starts off as an undercover Paris
fashion model put in place as a “fuckable” honey
trap. She's good at what she does and continually gets more challenging
assignments until CIA agent Lenny Miller (Cillian Murphy) turns her, and
then she's working for … who knows? Her goal is an early retirement,
but she'll need all her chess playing skills to pull that off.
Ideology
(Eccl. 4:7-8) “Then I returned, and I saw vanity under the sun. There is one alone, and there is not a second; yea, he hath neither child nor brother: yet is there no end of all his labour; neither is his eye satisfied with riches; neither saith he, For whom do I labour, and bereave my soul of good? This is also vanity, yea, it is a sore travail.” Anna is tired of her sore travail. Her parents are deceased and she has no living relatives to support. She's accustomed to a Spartan Russian existence; she's not after the finer things for herself. Yet her assignments have no end.
(Eccl. 4:9-12) “Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Anna at least has a guardian angel (or two) in her recruiter(s). Eventually the three of them will get together to see about her retirement. In the meantime she befriends a fellow model for comfort, dinner, and a Hawaiian vacation with muff-diving.
Production Values
“” (2019) was written, produced and directed by Luc Besson. It stars Sasha Luss, Helen Mirren, and Luke Evans. It had brilliant acting by the lead actress and very bad acting by everybody else. MPAA rated it R for strong violence, language, and some sexual content. The cinematography, background score, action and editing were class acts.
The screenplay was deliberately constructed to obfuscate the plot as various inner-Annas were exposed through time jumps, resembling Matryoskas, Russian nested dolls. The thrill of exposure was offset in this acey-deucy script by various overworked Hollywood memes: The child chess prodigy was an unlikely female and the chess moves too helter skelter—and in one instance illegal. Moscow women are altogether too stocky—they need the padding to withstand their cold winters—to assign that city as a recruiting source for (slim) Western models—James Bond picked at least one of his Russian babes from Georgia where the warmer clime accommodates a frame more svelte. Anna herself looks great to the Western eye, but she's too weedy to defeat endless big brutes in hand-to-hand combat. Proper martial arts training takes more time, too. The sex scenes are too frenetic; can't anyone slow down and enjoy themselves? The weapons are improperly held in a horizontal firing position. A Russian woman shoulders mental burdens that would be hard to hide from a fashion camera. But, hey, who cares?
Review Conclusion w/ Christian Recommendation
“Anna” worked fine for an end of summer movie where one can enjoy the flamboyant action and not worry about it making too much sense. The movie should be easy to forget, allowing one to clear the decks for better fall fare. As a DVD it would make a good punishment disc for people who can't agree together on which movie to watch.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Edge of your seat action-packed. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Average special effects. Video Occasion: As a last resort. Suspense: Keeps you on the edge of your seat. Overall movie rating: Three stars out of five.
bibles.n7nz.org