Luc Besson has been telling the same story for three decades. A young woman with no future accepts a deal that trades her freedom for her talents, becomes the deadliest person in any room, and spends the film working her way back out. La Femme Nikita established this template; Anna follows it faithfully, with Sasha Luss behind the gun and a non-linear structure that reshuffles the deck to keep the audience off-balance. Whether that constitutes sophistication or repetition depends on which side of the Besson argument you sit — but the argument is old enough now that neither side expects to win it.

What tips Anna toward the former is a sequence roughly twenty minutes in, when Anna completes her first KGB assignment in a Moscow restaurant. Besson and cinematographer Thierry Arbogast — who has shot his films since Nikita itself, a collaboration now spanning thirty-plus years — build the scene around improvised weapons and spatial compression: Anna moves through three dozen armed men using broken crockery, a steak knife, and the advantage of being completely underestimated. The choreography is spatially coherent, efficient, and genuinely surprising. For those eight minutes, the film earns its genre without apology.

Helen Mirren, as the KGB handler Olga, provides the film’s true center of gravity. Mirren plays authority as a private joke — she has seen everything, survived everything, and still finds the whole operation mildly entertaining — and the combination of controlled menace and dry precision is exactly what the film needs when Luss’s Anna goes still. Cillian Murphy’s CIA operative completes the triangle with the same quality: watchful, slightly sad, calibrated with enough restraint that every scene between them feels like two people reading each other’s mail without looking up.

Luss herself is the film’s most complicated element. She handles the physical demands with genuine assurance — the stunt coordination is rigorous, and she sells it — but the scenes that ask Anna to calculate, to feel, to perform an intimacy she is not experiencing require a dramatic precision she hadn’t yet developed at this point in her career. Anne Parillaud carried Nikita on the weight of visible damage; Luss is more controlled but less inhabited. The non-linear structure compensates by keeping its protagonist in motion, repeatedly reordering events to reveal that what looked like betrayal was strategy. This works cleanly on first viewing. On reflection, it shows a film more invested in the mechanics of the plot than in the interior life of the person those mechanics are supposedly serving.

Éric Serra’s score — another Besson collaboration that stretches back to Subway in the mid-1980s — propels the action sequences with the reliable urgency of a craftsman who knows exactly what is needed and delivers it. The Paris sequences make productive use of the fashion-modeling cover: the industry that aestheticizes the female body as the disguise for the profession that weaponizes it is an irony Besson has visited before. It was at the heart of Nikita too. Whether it bears repeating or simply confirms that Besson has been circling the same territory until the groove wore deep is a question Anna raises but does not answer.

Anna earns a place on any genre watchlist without earning a place in the Besson canon. Watch it for Helen Mirren making espionage feel like a test of patience she has already passed, for a restaurant fight sequence that stands among the better-constructed pieces of late Besson action, and for Cillian Murphy making a CIA handler feel like a man genuinely troubled by his own profession. What you will not find is reinvention, or a film willing to sit still long enough to let its protagonist carry it. What you will find is a capable, glossy, perfectly disposable spy thriller from a director coasting on a formula he invented and has never needed to leave.