This article is about the film entitled Nikita, released in other countries as La Femme Nikita. For other uses, see Nikita (disambiguation).

Nikita
original film poster
Directed by	Luc Besson
Produced by	Patrice Ledoux (uncredited)
Written by	Luc Besson
Starring	Anne Parillaud Jean-Hugues Anglade Tchéky Karyo
Music by	Éric Serra
Distributed by	Gaumont
Release date(s)	February 21, 1990 (France)
Running time	115 min.
Language	French
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Nikita (re-titled La Femme Nikita in some countries) is a 1990 French movie written and directed by Luc Besson.

Plot

Nikita (Anne Parillaud) begins the film as a teenage delinquent and heroin addict who attempts to rob the pharmacy run by the parents of one of her fellow addicts. The heist degenerates into a firefight with the local police in which her friends are killed. Suffering from severe withdrawal symptoms, she then shoots one of the police officers. Nikita is arrested and put on trial. Convicted of murder, she is then sentenced to life imprisonment, without parole review in thirty years. In prison, she is injected with drugs that simulate her death.

When she recovers consciousness, she finds herself in an anonymous room. A man (Tchéky Karyo) enters, and reveals that although she is now officially listed as dead and buried, having committed suicide by drug overdose, in reality she is in the custody of the DGSE, the French intelligence agency.

Here she is given the choice of either working for the DGSE as an assassin or being killed for real. After some resistance, she opts for the former, and eventually proves to be a talented operative. One of her trainers, Amande (Jeanne Moreau), transforms Nikita from a sweet girl to a femme fatale.

Her induction mission, the elimination of foreign dignitaries in an expensive restaurant, is a notable set-piece sequence of the film. In due course, she is allowed to leave the training centre, and begins a new life as a sleeper agent in suburbia with her boyfriend, a man she meets shopping at her local supermarket (Jean-Hugues Anglade).

Her covert career continues, until a mission to recover documents from a foreign embassy goes spectacularly wrong, requiring the services of a cleaner (Jean Reno) to destroy all the evidence, including the corpses of casaulties. In the end, the crime cleaner dies and Nikita leaves the city and her boyfriend.

Reception

The film received some positive reviews from critics including Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.^{[citation needed]} The film was one of the early modern action films from France to have a broad worldwide appeal.^{[citation needed]} Critics and filmgoers alike noted Besson's reversal and his take on Hollywood and Hong Kong action films, but with a decidedly French style.

Remake

In 1993, Warner Bros. remade the film in English as Point of No Return (also known as The Assassin), directed by John Badham and starring Bridget Fonda. Nikita also served as inspiration for the 1991 Hong Kong action picture Black Cat, which closely followed the original film’s storyline, but not enough to be called an outright remake.

TV series

A TV series was produced in 1997 based in this film. It was produced in Canada by Warner Bros. and Fireworks Entertainment. La Femme Nikita ran for five seasons on USA Network, and generated a sizeable cult following of its own. It was created by Joel Surnow, who later co-created 24 with fellow La Femme Nikita executive consultant Robert Cochran.

See also

• Assassinations in fiction
• Girls with guns

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Nikita

• Nikita at the Internet Movie Database

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