Code name: Nina

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Movie
German title Code name: Nina
Original title Point of No Return (aka The Assassin)
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1993
length 103 minutes
Age rating FSK 18 (unabridged version)
Rod
Director John Badham
script Robert Getchell
Alexandra Seros
production Kind Linson
music Hans Zimmer
Harry Perry (Song Entertainment City )
camera Michael W. Watkins
cut Frank Morriss
occupation

Codename: Nina ( Point of No Return ) is an American thriller directed by John Badham from 1993 . It is a remake of the 1990 thriller Nikita by Luc Besson .

action

Young drug addict Maggie Hayward breaks into a pharmacy with her clique. When the police summoned the group, there is an exchange of fire with several dead, in which Maggie kills a police officer. For this act she is sentenced to death and apparently executed with lethal injection , but a secret government organization in the form of the secret service agent Bob offers her a second chance: Either she works as a killer for the government or she is eliminated.

Bob gives her an hour to think about it. When he visits her in her cell, she knocks him down and unceremoniously takes him hostage. Bob manages to overpower her and shoots her in the leg as punishment. A little later she agreed to the agreement, but asked Bob to record her favorite singer Nina Simone , after which she was given her code name Nina .

The training to become a contract killer includes general combat and shooting training, the use of computers and rules of behavior . Nina becomes more rebellious at times, but she changes to a docile student when she learns that if she doesn't change her behavior within six months, she should be killed. One day Bob invites her to dinner outside the closed facility, but it quickly turns out to be the first job she does. Your training ends with this test.

Nina receives a new identity as Claudia Anne Doran and is to lead a bourgeois life from now on as camouflage. She looks for an apartment in Venice Beach and meets the photographer J.P. and falls in love with him. Since Nina J. P. confides only a few details from her past and evades his questions, tensions between the two of them arise again and again.

On her next assignment, disguised as a service person, she unwittingly brings explosives into a hotel room that the secret service employees had hidden in the coffee set. As she leaves the hotel, she sees the explosion and is visibly shocked. That same evening, Bob visits Nina and her boyfriend, whom he wants to check out "routinely". He poses as her uncle and partner in a travel agency, tells J. P. fictional details from Nina's childhood and gives them a trip to New Orleans to see Mardi Gras .

When Nina in New Orleans has to commit a murder attempt from a bathroom window with a precision rifle, while J.P. proposes marriage to her through the door, she decides to get out. However, Bob later explains to her that this is impossible. He hands her another assignment in which she is supposed to save the archives of a gun man on disk and kill him. In order to get past his bodyguards, she should pretend to be his lover. Even the preparations are not going according to plan and the organization sends Viktor, a cleaner . Viktor is supposed to remove all traces, including Nina, after she finishes her assignment. However, Nina suspects something when they both drive away from the crime scene. A fight ensues in which Viktor falls into a ravine with his car.

In the final sequence, Bob goes to Nina's apartment. Her friend hands Bob the floppy disk and tells him it has left. When Bob drives away, he and Nina see each other on the street. However, he does not follow her, but reports to his superiors that, in addition to Viktor, she was also killed in the car accident.

Reviews

James Berardinelli praised Bridget Fonda and Gabriel Byrne's portrayals on ReelViews , but criticized those of Dermot Mulroney and Harvey Keitel. He also criticized the direction and camera work, which he compared negatively with the original film Nikita . He wrote that he couldn't understand why a remake would be made after just a few years.

Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that the film was very similar to the original Nikita . He praised the portrayal of Bridget Fonda, which, however, does not show the same "poetic sadness" as Anne Parillaud in the original.

The lexicon of international films wrote that the film was "a remake that is true to the content and only differs stylistically from the original ('Nikita', director: Luc Besson, 1989) in that it aesthetically exaggerates the events."

The chronicle of the film wrote that the film was "above average", but Hollywood could have "saved itself the remake, if American viewers would once get involved with the subtitles of European productions."

backgrounds

Filming took place in California and Washington (DC) . The box office in the cinemas of the United States was about 30 million US dollars .

The English alternative title is The Assassin . The film is also available in a shortened version with an age rating of 16 years and over with a length of 102 minutes.

Trivia

A year later, Harvey Keitel played a cleaner again, this time in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction . In contrast to Codename: Nina Keitel received high praise from critics and audience for his performance in Pulp Fiction .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Review by James Berardinelli
  2. ↑ Roger Ebert : Critique. In: Chicago Sun-Times , March 19, 1993
  3. ↑ Code name: Nina. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  4. ↑ The Chronicle of the Film . Chronik Verlag, Gütersloh / Munich 1994, ISBN 3-86047-132-5 , p. 595
  5. ↑ Filming locations for Point of No Return. Internet Movie Database , accessed May 22, 2015 .
  6. ↑ Business Data for Point of No Return. Internet Movie Database , accessed May 22, 2015 .