109 min | R | August 20, 2021 | Lionsgate
A retired assassin learns her mentor has been murdered and goes hunting for the people who did it. Standing between her and revenge is a smiling fixer who flirts as easily as he kills. The chemistry is real. The plot around it is not.
Anna is a contract killer trained from childhood by an older assassin named Moody. She runs a rare bookshop in London as a cover and kills for money on the side. When Moody is murdered, Anna traces the killers back to a buried piece of her own history in Vietnam. The film presents itself as a revenge thriller. What it is really about is two professionals who recognize each other across the divide and would rather circle than shoot. The trouble is that the conspiracy driving them together collapses under its own machinery.
Maggie Q plays Anna with controlled physicality and a flat watchfulness that reads every room before she enters it. She moves through the action like someone who has done this work too long to enjoy it. Michael Keaton plays Michael Rembrandt as the cleaner sent to stop her, and he turns menace into a kind of courtship. Their scenes together crackle because both actors play the attraction and the threat at the same time. Samuel L. Jackson plays Moody with weary charm in the early stretch, and his absence leaves a hole the rest of the cast cannot fill. Robert Patrick turns up as Billy Boy and chews through his minutes with relish.
Martin Campbell directs the action with the clean geography he brought to the Bond films. You always know where the bodies are and where the exits sit. Richard Wenk’s script keeps stacking reveals about old debts and hidden parentage until the motivation curdles into nonsense. The cinematography favors burnished interiors and rain-slicked night streets, and the bookshop set gives Anna’s cover a tactile specificity the plot never earns. Campbell stages a hotel-room standoff between Q and Keaton that works as pure tension because the editing lets the two of them breathe.
The film keeps cutting away from the only thing it does well. Every minute spent on the Vietnam conspiracy is a minute stolen from Anna and Rembrandt sizing each other up over a drink. Campbell delivers competent set pieces and Q delivers a credible lead, but the engine underneath is generic revenge wiring dressed in expensive clothes. There is a sharp two-hander buried in here about two killers who cannot decide whether to kiss or kill. Wenk wraps it in a thriller too busy explaining itself to let that story land.