Tradecraft: Noir is Go

Nikita will soon have company in the female assassin sweepstakes on TV. According to Deadline, the cable channel Starz has officially greenlit Noir, the live action remake of an anime amnesiac assassin series that we heard they were developing late last year. Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, the powerhouse producing duo behind such TV hits as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess and Spartacus: Blood and Sand (also on Starz), as well noble misses in the spy genre like Jack of All Trades (starring a pre-Burn Notice Bruce Campbell) and Spy Game, will mastermind the show along with executive producers Steven Lightfoot (who penned the pilot) and Joshua Donen (who has partnered with Raimi and Tapert on Spartacus and Legend of the Seeker). Robert Ludlum tapped some sort of hidden vein with his 1980 bestseller The Bourne Identity, and ever since assassins and amnesia have been forever linked in the public psyche. The well-regarded anime series focuses on two female assassins suffering from the condition who discover they're mysteriously linked together and team up to battle a powerful secret society.

Colombiana Hits Theaters in August

When the trailer for Colombiana was released earlier this month, the latest neo-Eurospy assassin movie from the creators of Taken raced to the top of my must-see list.  Really, it's a great trailer, and it got a great audience reaction when I saw it in a theater in front of Thor.  For some reason I thought it was coming out either this fall or early next year (both traditional EuropaCorp release dates), but apparently we can look forward to seeing Zoe Saldana in action sooner than that! Deadline reports that Sony Pictures has set an August 26 release date in the United States.  I can't wait!

Tradecraft: Nikita Renewed!

Deadline reports that the CW has renewed its freshman series Nikita for another season, ending weeks of breathless speculation. At least the fifth incarnation of Luc Besson's seminal 1990 female assassin movie La Femme Nikita (following an American remake, a Hong Kong remake with a sequel and a long-running US/Canadian TV series), the latest version stars Maggie Q as the titular heroine and Lyndsy Fonseca as her agent inside the sinister, SMERSH-like Division. After an unforgettable advertising campaign last summer and a weak start last fall, this Nikita improved dramatically to become one of the best new spy series of the season. Its ratings, however, remained questionable, so a second season was by no means guaranteed.  But now it's got one, and I look forward to seeing where it goes! According to the trade blog, it will likely migrate from Thursdays to Fridays to be pared with the network's long-running hit Supernatural. Normally a Friday timeslot is the kiss of death, but I'm not sure that's necessarily the case on The CW. Personally, I'm fine with that, because Thursdays are pretty tough on my DVR.

Colombiana Trailer

Here's the trailer for the newest neo-Eurospy movie from Luc Besson's action factory, EuropaCorp.  "Neo-Eurospy," I should clarify, in that there's Gaul money behind this Olivier Megaton-directed actioner, not in that it's set in Europe or even that there are necessarily spies in it!  It's a close cousin of the spy movie, the professional assassin movie, and it's set in exotic South America.  But neo-Eurospy, like Eurospy, is to me more of a tone than a genre, and this one looks like it will fit right in with Besson's Transporter movies and Taken.  Plus, surely that tight black catsuit qualifies it automatically for all sorts of spy genres!  Colombiana, starring Zoe Saldana and Alias' Michael Vartan, is written by Besson and his Taken collaborator Robert Mark Kamen.  Megaton directed the neo-Eurospy flicks Transporter 3 and Hitman, and is slated to next direct Taken 2 for Besson.  Oh, and Colombiana looks pretty awesome!  Check it out:

New Hanna Trailer

Joe Wright's Hanna is the next major studio spy movie on the horizon, and there's a new, action-packed international trailer out now that reveals a bit more than the teaser or the very cool poster. We may have seen this plot before (a highly-trained assassin tries to live a normal life, only to have nefarious forces from the past come to find them), but never with a fifteen-year-old girl! It really does look like Bourne with a kid, which is pretty cool. I like seeing a hardcore kid spy. Cody Banks this ain't, apparently.

Hanna Poster

Dark Horizons has revealed the visually striking poster for Joe Wright's upcoming teen assassin spy movie, Hanna, starring Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett, Eric Bana, Olivia Williams, Tom Hollander and Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery.  Hanna opens this April in the United States. Watch the exciting Bourne-meets-Nikita (meets Modesty Blaise) trailer here.

Tradecraft: Gray on Gray

Deadline reports that James Gray (Little Odessa, Two Lovers) has been tapped to direct The Gray Man, an international spy thriller based on a novel by Mark Greaney (the first in a series) that we first heard about last May, when Adam Cozad (who also took a crack at the forthcoming Jack Ryan reboot) landed the writing gig. Today's Deadline story gives a fuller logline than we had before: "Targeted by a powerful multinational corporation, a former CIA operative-turned ultimate assassin must fight his way across Europe and past special forces teams from around the world in order to save the life of his handler and the handler's family."

Gray recognizes that he's in Bourne territory, but wants to take a different approach to this sort of material than Paul Greengrass did on The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum (review here). Gray tells the trade blog, "What he did was a documentary-style objective approach, and he owns that style. I want to do the opposite." Rather than taking the man-in-the-street, cinema verite perspective that Greengrass famously uses, he plans to tell the story from the point of view of the assassin.  He goes on to describe a sequence in his film We Own the Night witnessed from Joaquin Phoenix's perspective in the backseat of a car. "Almost every shot was from Joaquin's point of view, inside that car, and I want to make a whole movie with that POV." He feels that approach is a good way to sympathize with a professional killer. "You humanize him by never distancing yourself from his experience. This story has emotional stakes that enable me to do that."

Hm. Like most people, I haven't seen We Own the Night, so I'm not quite sure what he's talking about here.  Does he intend to shoot the entire movie in a first-person style, like Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake (or Orson Welles' unrealized Heart of Darkness) so that we only ever see the lead actor in mirrors and whatnot?  Or does he just mean he'll keep the camera close to his protagonist?  I'm actually a fan of the subjective camera style in Lady in the Lake (and eager to watch Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void, which embraces it) and see a lot of potential for it in other genres, but I can't quite picture an entire action movie shot that way.  I also don't see it as being as opposite of Paul Greengrass's style as Gray does. There are occasions (especially in Green Zone) when Greengrass's camera appears to give viewers a nearly first-person glimpse of the action. Well, I'm certainly curious about this approach, and curious to see where Gray goes with it...

New Spy DVDs Out Last Week: Archer and The American

I don't think there are any major new spy releases this week, but there were two last week that I didn't get a chance to post about.  And one of them is a must-have, in my book.  Last Tuesday was my birthday (thank you, thank you) and Fox Home Entertainment decided to honor that by releasing my favorite new spy series of last year on DVD: Archer: The Complete Season One. A workplace comedy about a Bond-like (or, more accurately, Eurospy-like) superspy who's also a huge jerk and his dysfunctional family (some of them literally, some only figuratively) who all work at the spy agency, Archer is a show that lends itself to rewatching.  It's not for all tastes, though.  While the amazing Bond-inspired retro look of the FX series will appeal to Sixties spy fans, the sense of humor is more appropriate for fans of South Park or people not easily offended by the ribald. Personally, I think it's hilarious. 

Fox's 2-disc set boasts plenty of extras. Among them: the original unaired Archer pilot (I'm really looking forward to seeing that!), an unaired network promo, deleted scenes, a six-part "The Making Of Archer" featurette ("3D", "Animation", "Art Direction", "Backgrounds", "Illustration" and "Storyboards"), and bonus episodes from unrelated FX sitcoms The League and Louie (the latter of which is quite funny, if not at all spy-related).

I'm particularly excited about all of that behind-the-scenes material.  Archer is a great looking show, and I'm eager to see more about what goes into it.  It's so good looking, in fact, that I'm sorry this release is DVD only, and not on Blu-ray as well. I rarely care about that, but this is one series that would look great in HD. Oh well. At this year's Comic-Con panel, the creators of Archer went into a bit of detail about creating the look of Archer's perpetual Cold War world, which incorporates Bondian elements of every era from the Sixties to the Eighties to now (including suits that could have come off of Sean Connery's shoulders, stylish Sixties office furnature and a Living Daylights Aston Martin Volante).  They said that the design team was constantly flipping through Sixties style and design and fashion magazines, picking what they liked.  I hope that's in the documentary.  It's a shame that the Comic-Con panel itself isn't included, but it's hard to complain when there's so much else.  Archer: The Complete Season 1 retails for $29.98, but naturally it's significantly less on Amazon.

Meanwhile, that same day Universal released director Anton Corbijn's George Clooney assassin thriller meditation The American on both DVD and Blu-ray.  I'm really glad the studio has the courage to stick with that awesome theatrical poster art and not just stick a bluish close-up of Clooney's face on the front instead! Extras on both versions include deleted scenes, an audio commentary with Corbijn, and a featurette called (rather uncreatively) "Journey to Redemption: The Making of The American."  Retail is $29.98 for the DVD and $39.98 for the Blu-ray, but of course both can be found much cheaper than that. They're currently $14.99 and $23.99, respecitvely, on Amazon. While I didn't find The American to be quite as profound as it seemed to think it was, I really liked it nonetheless.  (Read my review here.) It's not fast-paced, but it does offer lots of beautiful location photography, which is a crucial element for me in good spy and assassin movies. It's a great looking movie, and I'm looking forward to watching it again.

Hanna Trailer

Here's the trailer for Hanna, the spy/assassin movie from Atonement director Joe Wright that we've been hearing about since last year, starring Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett and Eric Bana. Call it La Femme Nikita meets Leon or call it Bourne with a 15-year-old girl or call it Modesty Blaise: The Really Early Years; any way you put it, it adds up to cool.  Especially with a red-haired Blanchett playing the Joan Allen role of a vicious CIA bitch hunting our heroine.  (Judging from that shot of Blanchett with the silenced pistol, though, it looks like she gets her hands a bit dirtier than Allen does in the Bourne films.)  This is one of two high-profile female assassin movies from directors better known for artier fare in the pipeline for 2011. The other, Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, seems likely to be more low-brow. (Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you!)

Tradecraft: Sam Raimi Remakes Anime Assassins For Starz

Is Nikita not living up to your expectations for a female assassin series?  Or do you love it, and crave more female assassins on TV?  Either way, Sam Raimi's got the thing for you: um, more female assassins. The Hollywood Reporter reports that Starz has picked up a new series from Raimi and his Xena and Hercules co-producer, Robert Tapert, based on the anime series Noir.  According to the trade, "The premium cable network is developing Noir, a live-action U.S. remake of a 2001 show about two female assassins working in a criminal underworld. After discovering they're mysteriously linked, the two and have to work together on missions (under the moniker of 'Noir') until they figure out why and how they are connected -- or until one of them kills the other."  Raimi and Tapert produce the hit series Spartacus: Blood and Sand for the cabler, and have previously dabbled in the espionage milieu with the short-lives series Jack of All Trades (starring the great Bruce Campbell) and Spy Game.

First Pictures Of Zoe Saldana In Action In New Neo-Eurospy Movie

Latino Review (via /film) has posted the first pictures we've seen of Zoe Saldana in action as sexy assassin Cataleya Restrepo (gotta love that name!) in Luc Besson's latest neo-Eurospy movie, Columbiana.  As previously reported, she will be the first female lead in one of these EuropaCorp-produced budget action thrillers and, continuing the gender reversal, Alias's Michael Vartan will be the Eurospy babe.  Transporter 3's Olivier Megaton directs from a script by Besson and his Taken collaborator Robert Mark Kamen. That's just one of several intriguing pictures; head over to Latino Review to see the rest.
Thanks to Josh for the tip!

Movie Review: The American (2010)

It’s amazing how many elements The American (based on the book A Very Private Gentleman by Martin Booth) shares in common with the 1969 James Coburn movie Hard Contract. Both are slow-paced, existential assassin movies that generally eschew action in favor of philosophy and beautiful scenery. Both star iconoclastic leading men with famous smiles, liberal attitudes and a taste for quirkier roles. Both feature washed-up assassins (and what other variety of movie assassins are there?) who seek their sexual gratification from prostitutes in order to avoid forming any lasting connections, and who go off to Italy, meet a priest and a girl and discuss good and evil with the former and fall in love with the latter and eventually need to protect either or both from their assassin bosses, who naturally come after them in the end. That’s a remarkable set of similarities between the two films, but the same elements ultimately add up to entirely different wholes. Both obviously showcase the emptiness of a life dedicated to death and champion the importance of human connection, but then what assassin movie doesn’t? (The Matador still does that the best.) But the plots of the two films (such as The American has one, anyway) are different, as are their overall tones. The American doesn’t really break new ground in the plaintive assassin genre, but director Anton Corbijn still manages to tell the story as if it’s fresh, and he’s aided immeasurably by good performances, strikingly gorgeous locations and equally attractive stars.

The bodies of both George Clooney (in fantastic shape even at 49) and the breathtaking Violante Placido as Clara, the prostitute he falls in love with, are on full display (including in the steamiest love scene I’ve seen all year), fetishized as much as the breathtaking Italian countryside. Why all this beauty? I’d hazard that its purpose is to contrast sharply with death and destruction, two things which Clooney’s character (identified only as “Mr. Butterfly” after his peculiar tattoo) has devoted his life to. Like the movie as a whole, that contrast is less profound than Corbijn seems to think it is, but it’s certainly serviceable, especially when executed so capably. Clooney travels from one beautiful location to another (starting in scenic, snowy Scandinavia, always a favorite spy setting of mine) and taints them all with violence. His dark profession infects everyone he comes into contact with, even if it doesn’t mean for it to. After a romantic interlude at an isolated Swedish cabin ends in a bloodbath, it’s no wonder that he wants out of his profession. Exactly who he works for is never made clear: it could be a spy agency or a crime syndicate or a totally apolitical freelance outfit, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the nature of the work, which in the view presented here is the same no matter what the cause.

The American is a movie that leaves you with questions, sure, but not ones that you’re likely to find yourself pondering for days on end, like, say, Mulholland Drive. Instead my reaction was more, “well, it’s okay if the filmmakers didn’t really want to tell me everything. They still made a very pretty movie that I enjoyed watching for two hours, and I’ll take that. But I doubt I’ll really spend too much time poring over what it all means.”

Mr. Butterfly flees to the countryside, makes a few human connections (the aforementioned priest and prostitute) and reluctantly agrees to take on one last assignment. He doesn’t even have to pull the trigger; he simply has to make the weapon and deliver it to a beautiful, deadly young woman who could easily be his replacement in the world he’s trying to turn his back on. Not everything goes as planned (or maybe it does) and eventually his old employer shows up wanting to kill him. Violence ensues. That’s the plot, and that’s pretty much the entire plot. Yet I haven’t spoiled it, because it’s not really possible to spoil. The plot is just things that happen. That’s not what the movie’s about, and it doesn’t even bother to explain most of them. The movie is about the characters and the scenery and the interaction thereof detrimental to both. It’s sort of a tone poem, a meditation on violence sure to disappoint or even infuriate anyone expecting a Bourne-like action movie, for which a prospective viewer could be forgiven given the marketing campaign. Personally, I wasn’t disappointed. I didn’t totally buy into The American's delusions of profundity, but I didn’t mind looking at the images it had to show me, either, or weighing the themes it traded in. It delivered all the exotic locations and all the sex and even all the iconography of action (if not the action itself) that I expect from a good spy movie. Like the lead character when customizing a sniper rifle, Corbijn took apart all these pieces and reassembled them into something different, but for me the pieces themselves are reward enough. If you ever find yourself responding more to the visual tropes of a spy movie than to its actual plot, chances are you’ll find something to like in The American. If you demand plot and action (which are totally reasonable demands, by the way), then you may be disappointed.

Upcoming Spy DVDs: The American

DVDActive reports that Universal Home Video has announced DVD and Blu-ray releases of the George Clooney assassin thriller meditation The American for December 28–another birthday present for me!  I'm really glad the studio has the courage to stick with that awesome theatrical poster art and not just stick a bluish close-up of Clooney's face on the front instead. Extras on both versions will include deleted scenes, an audio commentary with director Anton Corbijn, and a featurette called (rather uncreatively) "Journey to Redemption: The Making of The American."  Retail is $29.98 for the DVD and $39.98 for the Blu-ray, but of course you won't have to actually pay those prices if you shop around. While I didn't find The American to be quite as profound as it seemed to think it was, I really liked it nonetheless.  It's not fast-paced, but it does offer lots of beautiful location photography, which is a crucial element for me in good spy and assassin movies.

Tradecraft: CW Picks Up Nikita For A Whole Season

I guess that controversial ad campaign worked. Deadline reports that the CW has given a full season order for its freshman spy show Nikita, the second TV incarnation of Luc Besson's classic female assassin character.  Nikita is apparently the second-highest rated show on the CW (which is sort of like being the second tallest person in Liechtenstein), but that doesn't stop the network from wanting to tinker with it.  Deadline reported last week that Noah Bean (Damages) has joined the cast as a recurring character, handsome and flirty CIA case officer Ryan Fletcher, a potential romantic interest for Nikita (Maggie Q).  EW's Michael Ausiello warned that this would happen earlier in the month, saying the network wanted to tone down the show's somber mood and "jack up its title character's love life."  These changes come, according to Ausiello, because despite the show's good ratings, there's high attrition among the CW's core audience: females 18-34.  It's hoped that adding some new characters, including another potential love interest, will fix that.  Actually, it might not be a bad idea, because from what I've seen, Maggie Q isn't generating much chemistry with Shane West.

TV Review: Nikita Pilot (2010)

The spy season began in earnest this week with the series premiere of The CW’s newest version of La Femme Nikita, simply titled Nikita. Nikita is the opening salvo in a fall television season as rife with secret agents as any since the Sixties. The character of Nikita began life in Luc Besson’s 1990 French film Nikita, released in America as La Femme Nikita and starring Anne Parillaud in the title role. It was a great movie, but hardly the most original premise. It’s basically Remo Williams meets My Fair Lady (with perhaps a dash of Callan thrown in for good measure*): a punk street kid is arrested for murder after a drug-related robbery gone wrong, her execution is faked, and instead she’s pressed into service for a top secret government agency, given no choice but to become a highly trained assassin. That’s not all she’s trained in, though. Her handler proves to be a closet Henry Higgins, and she’s trained to be a proper lady as well. The character showed a remarkable shelf life that no one could have guessed at back then, sustaining an unsanctioned 1991 Hong Kong remake, Black Cat (which also spawned a sequel), a 1993 American remake, Point of No Return (starring Bridget Fonda), a Canadian TV series (called La Femme Nikita again) that ran on the USA cable network from 1997-2001, starring Peta Wilson, and now another, unrelated TV version.

Nikita’s latest incarnation is very much its own animal, but full of homages to past versions. Instead of following the basic Nikita story of a violent girl plucked off the streets and trained to spy, this series picks up six years after that all happened, with Nikita on the run, having escaped her mysterious government handlers three years ago, and prepared to take the fight back to them. Even though the origin scene (for Alex, a new recruit, though, not Nikita) is right out of Besson’s film, the new show seems to owe more to Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse than any previous version of the Nikita story. There’s a whole stable of spy recruits who train in a big white gym for a shadowy organization known this time around as “Division.” There’s a tough, security-conscious male boss (24's Xander Berkeley) and a poised female one (Melinda Clarke, ably holding her own in a role previously played by Jeanne Moreau and Anne Bancroft). There’s a nerdy tech guy who looks (but doesn’t sound) like he just stepped off a Whedon set. Nikita is actually an improvement over Dollhouse in one respect, since it simplifies the premise (dropping the whole “programming empty vessels” thing), but doesn’t come close to living up to the Whedon show from a character perspective. Or to matching his snappy dialogue. Instead, Nikita trades in cliches like:

“I broke their most important rule.”
“What rule was that?”

You guessed it...

“I fell in love.”

Or, in a flashback with her dead fiancé:

“Promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“Promise me this isn’t a dream that I’ll wake up from.”

Yeah, dialogue isn’t its strong suit, but the new Nikita pilot certainly has its moments. The opening kill (with Nikita in a red bathing suit) is spectacular, and sure to hook viewers in, and there’s a great scene where Nikita (pushing a room service cart loaded with the tasered body of a guy she wants to question) comes face to face with Division’s nastiest cleaner in a hotel hallway, and their standoff is interrupted by a family walking between them. Another standout moment finds Nikita, while all of Division hunts for her, walking right up to former boss Berkeley at a fancy Washington DC shindig and threatening to hit him where it hurts the most. “My feelings?” he asks, sarcastically. “No,” she replies, “your funding.”

Berkeley is his reliably slimy self, and clearly relishing the role. Maggie Q looks hot, and gets lots of opportunities to parade about in bras or bathing suits. The script for the pilot doesn’t afford her the opportunity to explore much character depth yet, though. Shane West, who starred opposite the original TV Nikita, Peta Wilson, in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (for which both were woefully miscast), plays Michael, the agent in charge of training new recruits at Division. West positively drips Evil, and I was prepared to write him off as a ham-fisted over-actor, but his over-the-top approach actually blinded me to an interesting twist with his character that I probably should have seen coming a mile away, so perhaps there’s more to him as an actor than seems to meet the eye in the pilot.

Nikita describes Division as “a US weapon that the United States has lost control of.” Instead, she insists that the agency takes its wetwork contracts from big corporations and oil companies–the worst of the worst! Furthermore, their target this week is an African diplomat who will do great things for his people, but probably kick out the oil companies. It’s always African diplomats in this sort of scenario. (See: The Bourne Identity.) All that makes Division a pretty generic Evil Organization for this day and age, but it’s also modern narrative shorthand to justify her outsider status and her hellbent desire to take apart her old bosses. In other words, it’s SD-6 all over again. The Alias references are inevitable, but Covert Affairs has shown that it’s definitely possible for other series to carve out their own niches within the Alias subgenre. The Nikita pilot wasn’t as promising as that show’s, but despite its flaws it was promising enough (especially a good last act twist involving the Alex character) for me to tune in again next week. (Even though it feels a bit weird to be watching The CW again, for the first time since they cancelled Veronica Mars, in my thirties, seeing all those ads for stuff like Gossip Girl and 90210!) After all, the Nikita concept basically comes down to a hot girl with a big gun (which means the pilot delivered exactly what was promised in that sexy advertising campaign), and there will always be a certain appeal in that...

*An influence that came full circle when Edward Woodward guest-starred in a recurring role on the final season of the USA TV series.

Reminder: CW's Nikita Debuts Tonight!

The spy season starts tonight (Thursday, September 9) with the CW's Nikita leading the onslaught of all the new spy-related programs populating the new TV season. The fourth incarnation (or maybe fifth?) of the female assassin created two decades ago by Luc Besson drops the "La Femme" and finds Nikita (as the show is known) embodied by the beautiful Maggie Q (Mission: Impossible III).  The provocative poster campaign was certainly hard to ignore; I hope the series lives up to it! Watch a trailer on the show's official site or check out my earlier post here for more of those sexy poster images. Or just tune in tonight at 9/8 Central and judge for yourself.

Poster For The American

I like this new poster for the George Clooney assassin movie The American.  Frankly, I'm dubious that any movie in this genre can top Pierce Brosnan's awesome turn in The Matador, but I think both trailers look good nonetheless.  Beautiful European locations, beautiful women, international intrigue, a priest with a gun and Clooney as an assassin... I'm in.  And that stark one-sheet is really great. You can watch both trailers on Yahoo's page for the movie.  The American opens September 1.