Film Review: Point of No Return (1993)

In 1990s major Hollywood studios loved to remake successful French films. One of the most successful and the most influential of them all, Luc Besson’s action thriller La Femme Nikita, was bound to get the same treatment. It happened with Point of No Return, 1993 film directed by John Badham.

The film setting is changed from France to USA. Plot begins in Washington D.C. when a gang of drug addicts, including young woman Maggie Hayward (played by Bridget Fonda), tries to rob a pharmacy, leading to bloody shoot out with police. Maggie kills a policeman and she is subsequently sentenced to die from lethal injection. Instead of being executed, she is merely put to sleep and wakes up in secret government facility when an official named Bob (played by Gabriel Byrne) offers her a simple choice – either to enter training program for top secret assassins or get killed for real. Maggie reluctantly takes the first options and gradually learns new skills that involve weapons, martial arts, computers and foreign languages while another operative named Amanda (played by Anne Bancroft) teaches her how to refine and use her feminine charms. After showing that she can handle difficult situation during her first mission, Maggie is allowed to leave training compound and begin new life in Venice, California. There she meets J.P. (played by Dermot Mulroney), young photographer, and begins to live with him. Her happiness is, however, short-lived because she gets called back into service and ordered to carry out assassination. This takes increasingly heavy toll on her personal life and mental wellbeing and she starts contemplating ways to leave the service.

Whether you would enjoy Point of No Return or not depends mostly on whether you watched La Femme Nikita previously. Script by Robert Getchell and Alexandra Seros is extremely faithful adaptation of the Besson’s original, so there won’t be much surprises in the plot. John Badham, director known for some of the finest action films and thrillers in 1980s, doesn’t try to inject much originality (except at the very end) and the inevitable comparisons with Besson are at his expense. There are some lame attempts to make few new details, like the sunny Californian setting or main character being obsessed with songs of Nina Simone. Casting is adequate, with Bridget Fonda, one of the most underrated actresses of her generation, trying and for the most part succeeding making her performance stand out from Anne Parillaud in the original. Fonda’s Maggie is more thoughtful and restrained than Parillaud’s Nikita, so the transformation from hopeless drug addict into efficient government asset is more convincing. Fonda also uses her relatively small stature to make her character look more vulnerable and more feminine. Unfortunately, Dermot Mulroney lacks any chemistry with her, while Gabriel Byrne sleepwalks through his role. The only actor rather than Fonda that leaves great impression is Harvey Keitel in small, but effective role of Victor, sadistic “cleaner”, which can be viewed as test run for his much better known role of Winston Wolfe in Pulp Fiction. Music score by Hans Zimmer, on the other hand, sound uninspiring even when not compared with Eric Serra’s work in the original. Taken without comparisons with French film Point of No Return is mildly satisfying piece of action cinema that could be recommended to viewers who don’t have high expectations. Although relatively successful at the box office, Point of No Return started downward trend in John Badham’s career that would ultimately make him abandon big screen for the sake of television. Besson’s film was remade twice more on small screen – in 1990s as a series starring Peta Wilson and in 2010s as a series starring Maggie Q.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

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