La Femme Nikita on Blu-ray Disc Review
By Brandon A. DuHamel
The Film
La Femme Nikita is a 1990 French action film by writer/director Luc Besson. At the time of its release,
Nikita became an international sensation heralding in a new era of action films with female protagonists at their helm who could be just as callous and deadly as their male counterparts.
The film is the story of a 19-year-old junkie who becomes involved in a violent shootout with her cronies while robbing a pharmacy looking for their next fix. Nikita (Anne Parillaud), strung out and suffering withdrawal, violently murders a police officer and is captured. She is sentenced by the courts to life imprisonment with a minimum of 30 years before considering parole.
A man known simply as "Bob" (Tchéky Karyo) saves her from her fate in prison, staging her death, and enlists her into a program to become a secret government assassin. After three years of intensive training in martial arts, art, dance, and weaponry, among other things, Nikita is turned from a druggie punk into a cultured, beautiful, ruthless killer. After passing her first test, to kill three men in a restaurant, she is sent out into the world undercover to await further instruction.
Now known as "Marie" with the code name "Josephine", she takes on an ordinary life, moving into an apartment and even developing a relationship with a man who becomes her fiancée, but she struggles to reconcile her normal life with the life of an assassin.
Besson's film is highly stylized, with dark lighting, shadowy streets and the pulsating rhythms of Europop. Anne Parrillaud's performance is makes this film come alive. From her drug-addled rants to her uneasy-at-first killing, she portrays a woman seemingly on the brink of a breakdown, yet managing to hold it together to help save herself from the punishment she most likely deserved. There was a 1993 U.S. remake of this film from Warner Brothers, Point of No Return, starring Bridget Fonda. Fonda's performance feels bland in comparison.
The Picture
Sony has released done yet another excellent job on the release of
La Femme Nikita. The 2.35:1 framing is encoded in AVC/MPEG-4 averaging a solid 25Mbps. The picture is sharp and detailed with a fine and consistent grain structure. Because of the nature of the film, colors don't quite pop, but they are strong ad consistent. The one thing that keeps this from being a completely perfect transfer is the black levels. Although blacks are deep and solid, they are too dark, with many instances of crushing and lost details in darker scenes.
The Sound
The Blu-ray Disc comes with two audio options, the original language French Dolby TrueHD 5.1 lossless and an English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 dubbed version. Listening to the French TrueHD with English subtitles, the sound is big and adequate with large amounts of reverberation and ambient sound effects in the surround channels. There is little in the way of discrete information panned into the rear channels. There are some occasional gunshots that seem to migrate into the surrounds, but mostly the sound stays in the front three channels. Dialogue is unsullied and deployed from the center channel and low frequencies extension is enough to make the europop soundtrack thump with authority and offer realism to the gunfire sound effects, but it won't bring down the walls anytime soon.
The Extras
The only extras on this release are high definition trailers for
Felon,
Resident Evil: Degeneration,
The Fall,
Starship Troopers 3: Marauder, and a
Blu-ray is High Definition promo. Additionally, the disc is BD-Live enabled, but I could not get the BD-Live feature to work at the time of the review.
Final Thoughts
This is an exciting action film that only Luc Besson could create. In
Nikita, Besson gave the world a glimpse of what was to come in his next film,
Léon. The violence never overwhelms the characters and the action is not gratuitous, but deliberate. This strong Blu-ray transfer will make an excellent edition to anyone's library, despite its lack of any worthwhile extras.
Where to Buy
Product Details
- Actors: Anne Parillaud, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Tcheky Karyo
- Director: Luc Besson
- Audio/Languages: French & English Dolby TrueHD 5.1
- Subtitles: Chinese Traditional, English, English SDH, French, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish
- Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
- Number of discs: 1
- Rating: R
- Studio: Sony Pictures
- Blu-ray Release Date: December 2, 2008
- Run Time: 117 minutes
- List Price: $28.95
- Extras:
