'ANNA'.......LUC-WARM SPYJINKS......

Anna (2019)    It didn't even occur to us that this one snuck in and out of theaters in ten minutes due to director Luc Besson being accused of sexual no-no's among his crew......

                 We just thought it disappeared cause it blew chunks......

                  Then again, the wobbly wheels of the once busy Besson Movie Machine were already coming off....... with the total failure of his sci-fi hodge-podge "Valerian and...." ...oh, who cares what the hell the rest of it was called......

                   Heavy, heavy Deja Vu here........Besson struggles to haul this movie into profitability by making it an amped-up version of his greatest hit, "La Femme Nikita"......

                  A Russian hit-babe (supermodel Sacha Luss) does look spiffy and spry as she kicks and shoots the living shit out of endless amounts of thugs, bodyguards and soldiers....

                   But sorry, Luc......a hot girl beating people up does not make a movie, even if she pokes some dude so many times with a fork, his face looks like our own middle school acne..........you forgot it only worked for you in the past because you were smart enough to use real actresses.....

                 Not this time. As an actress-model.......well, she's a super....uh.....model.

                  The epic smackdowns only take up a few scenes, though.......the bulk of this movie's ungainly, overlong script deals with Luss in lust with her competing spy handlers, a CIA suit (Cillian Murphy) and a KGB Komrade (Luke Evans)......

                  Workin' two sides at once proves way complicated for poor Sacha (not to mention the audience too).....and forever lurking in the back seat of a car, sits the odious Olga (Helen Mirren), a heartless KGB Medusa-In-Chief......(Mirren looks like she's waiting for someone to drop dead so she can eat....)

                    Besson no doubt thinks he's enormously clever by backing up into flashbacks every 20 minutes or so to further explain the story's various reversal-of-fortune twists.........and these tedious tricks drag on the very end of the film......

                   Overall, though, it's not nearly as horrendous as some critics would lead you to believe......(more likely they were reviewing Besson's off-the-set #MeToo accusations).....and we've seen far worse versions of the same movie.......(try Jennifer Lawrence's "Red Sparrow", for instance)

                   Therefore, 1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2) for a director trying to save his career with a way-too-long rehash of one of his old, far better films.  Kind of sad, if you think about it for any amount of time......

                    But then.....this movie's so not worth thinking about......for any amount of time.