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Point of No Return

Point of No Return

List Price: $9.97
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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Leaves a lot to be desired; watch it once and only once.
Review: In my recent review of the CD soundtrack for this movie, I suggested that Point of No Return may be a film in which the music outshines the on-screen action it is written to accentuate. In this case I feel that most if not all of the movie's faults lie with Bridget Fonda.

Bridget may carry the famous Fonda name, but when it comes to acting, a movie like PONR makes it appear as though she has a lot of talent and potential---the majority of which she isn't using. (This became more apparent to me after I saw her in "Single White Female", but that's another story.)

When her character isn't asassinating people, she's either lounging around listening to Nina Simone or trying to maintain a relationship with a man she loves but knows she'll lose due to the nature of her work.

Watching this movie makes it extremely difficult to believe that an entire cult TV show on the USA network was inspired by it. The concept is somewhat screwed up anyway: a recovering female drug addict training to be Superhitwoman while receiving lessons in table manners from Anne Bancroft. Bottom line: watch this movie if you like gun toting women and don't care if the acting is often shabby.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Saggy remake
Review: It's a universal movie law that good movies should never, ever be remade, certainly not revamped to fit Hollywood tastes. "Point of No Return" violates both those laws with this mind-numbing remake and revamp of Luc Besson's stylish action flick "La Femme Nikita."

She's a violent, savage, drug-addled thief, and during a break-in she coldly shoots a cop through the head. But Maggie Hayward is given another chance. After supposedly dying by lethal injection, she wakes up in a secret government compound and is offered a choice by secret agent Bob (Gabriel Byrne) : Die for real, or be trained as an assassin. She reluctantly chooses the latter, and after many months of rebellion becomes a killer with style and sophistication.

She enters a new life in California and moves in with a naive photographer (Dermot Mulroney). For awhile, it seems like Maggie has a new life -- until she is called out to bomb a building. After that, she realizes that she really has changed, and wants out. Bob promises to help if she does one last mission, impersonating a billionaire's spoiled girlfriend. But there is only one way out of the organization -- being killed herself.

"Point of No Return" is sort of "A Day in the Life of a Bond Girl." The concept of the street-thug-turned-spy is an intriguing one, but it degenerates about five minutes in. The direction is lackluster, the acting is dull, and the plot is improbable. (I wonder why nobody has noticed all the exploding hotels and high-profile "disappearances" that the government has caused...)

Direction is fairly bad; the film moves with remarkable sluggishness, with only intermittent action. There is only one real gun battle, and that is ruined because it's such a silly piece of work. The slow-motion and odd angles seem calculated to make it look cool, but the overall feeling is that they just wanted to show Fonda bounding and diving around in sexy outfits.

Maggie is presented as such a psychotic wreck at the beginning that her sudden transformation into a sophisticated, trustworthy spy seems fake. Even faker is her sudden unwillingness to kill criminals, when she tried to batter everyone else. It doesn't help that Fonda lacks the solidarity and strength to make such a role work; she just smirks, leers and tears up. Byrne has more dimension as Bob, but he's underused. Mulroney was mildly annoying as the pleasant but nosy boyfriend.

If you're simply looking for a girl-with-big-gun movie, this will fill the bill. But if you're looking for a good action thriller, keep looking for something better.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: What was Harvey Keitel thinking?
Review: La Femme Nikita La Femme Nikita La Femme Nikita This re-make only goes to prove Hollywood thinks its American audiences are a bunch of morons who won't read subtitles. See La Femme Nikita instead. Anne Parillaud (french version)makes a convincing and sophisticated natural born killer while Bridget Fonda looks like a doe trapped in someone's headlights.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: LOVED BRIDGET FONDA and HEARING VIKKI CARR
Review: Loved Bridget Fonda's acting and the choice of using
Vikki Carr's 'Love Me With All Your Heart" in Spanish!

That should have been on the soundtrack!!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: ''I'm the cleaner...''
Review: Servicable american remake of the french cult classic 'Nikita'- solid effort all around, but Harvey keitel as the cleaner wins it the high rating- even colder and more of a threat here than Reno's interpretation. Good fun.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: "return to the original"
Review: Since I am a fan of the French version, La Femme Nikita, I was really excited to see and share this film with my family. Do yourself a favor, get the original. Part of what made the original so great was Nikita's transformation from a dirty druggie, to a sexy yet vunerable spy/agent. Bridget Fonda is soo unbelievable in this role it's appalling. 1) There is something about her personality and character that you really can't believe that she has suffered a day in her life. So she is no good as a drug addict 2) While I can see that people might find Fonda pretty, she lacks the hard core sexiness and strength that's needed to portray a secret agent. So she fails on both counts. The whole movie was so plain vanilla, it was sad. It's like expecting to go to a five star restaurant and get a five star dessert..and instead, you get the diet sponge cake that tastes like cardboard.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Pitiful remake...
Review: The excellent original French film, Luc Besson's "La Femme Nikita" (the ridiculous U.S. title for "Nikita"), is unavoidably 'remade' with no style by the Hollywood big shots who as usual prefered to produce a local - and commercial - version of a foreign language film they have liked instead of distributing this film all over their country. That's what we call 'recovery', the result of an isolationist - and greedy - mentality. And the result is always bad, always. "Point of no Return" is no exception: the film is so bad, so pitiful that Luc Besson himself, disgusted, have shot his next film, "Leon - the Professional", in the United States and in English language to avoid any similar massacre. Bridget Fonda looks more like a damn dirty female kid than like a Punk, hateful, determined hoodlum, and the heavy, tough aesthetics of the film doesn't at all fit its supposed real subject: distress. Gabriel Byrne, Harvey Keitel, Anne Bancroft and Miguel Ferrer are very good but they can't be very much help to this brainless TV-looking film which has brought out an even more desperately silly TV series.

"La Femme Nikita" wasn't distributed in the U.S. theaters but that "Point of no Return" was in France. Frankly, I've been wondering why for long. And we can be amazed when we think that this lousy film was directed by the same man who gave us "War Games" and "Saturday Night Fever"...

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Get the original and enjoiy
Review: The french original has vastly more style and presence than this remake. Fonda, who does a very nice job in "Kiss of the Dragon", carries neither the street threat of the "before" or the conflicted calculating assasin of the "after". A copy in the worst sense.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Velveeta vs. the elegant French cheese
Review: The original French movie, La Femme Nikita, was a wonderfully innovative film: highly stylized, punkishly sexy, edgy-Euro-cool, hard and soft in all the right new places. The original also featured some of the most exciting close-quarter-battle action sequences ever filmed.

Well, PONR doesn't do that. Instead, it's the sanitized, Hollywoodized, tame remake for the American masses.

WHO MIGHT LIKE THIS MOVIE: If your idea of culture is prime-time TV and Readers Digest ... if you're suspicious of foreign movies, and you can't stand subtitles ... well then, PONR may be the version you prefer.

WHO MIGHT HATE THIS MOVIE: Viewers who liked Ronin, The Little Drummer Girl, and so on, should avoid this Chef Bore-a-roni meltdown. To fans of European films, in particular, watching Point Of No Return may well feel like eating cardboard: it can deaden the senses. You may feel as if Velveeta corporate headquarters had hurriedly launched a for-the-masses imitation a fine French cheese, just to score some market share points. Avoid.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: No Point in Returning
Review: The ravaging of a great film. How I hate this movie. Butchers, slices, dices and guts the original. What a waste of time.


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