Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 20, 1993 TAG: 9303200246
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: C9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
REMAKE DIDN'T IMPROVE `POINT OF NO RETURN' PLOT
Remakes tend to be either major reworkings of the source material or faithful copies."Point of No Return" is the latter, a play-by-play American version of the French movie "La Femme Nikita."
Its plot is just as preposterous, and its tone is just as dopily romantic, though director John Badham has toned down some of the Gallic existentialism here.
More important, Bridget Fonda grounds the movie with some American-style naturalism as opposed to Anne Parillaud's fashion-model posturing in the original.
Fonda plays Maggie, a strung-out junkie and cold-blooded cop killer with the original bad attitude.
The movie begins with a robbery in which a policeman is killed. Maggie is sentenced to death for the crime, and the sentence appears to be carried out. But after her supposedly lethal injection, she awakes in a secret compound, where James Bond meets Pygmalion.
Maggie has been picked to become an assassin for an unidentified government agency. Her case worker is Bob, played by Gabriel Byrne. Bob and a Miss Manners-type played by Anne Bancroft set out to turn Maggie into a government agent who uses the right fork and can shoot big guns. After rigorous training, she's unleashed on her targets in plots that seem incredibly stupid.
There is the temptation to say that these schemes are major plot flaws because they're too harebrained. But keep in mind Maggie is working for the same government who gave you the Bay of Pigs, Watergate and Iran-Contra. Still, the movie doesn't aspire to realism, though Lu Besson, the director of the original, and Badham both seem to take this story way too seriously.
After Maggie has her bad teeth capped, she loses all of her unchanneled anger. And after she meets a photographer played by Dermot Mulroney, she decides that killing people may not be an appropriate way to make a living.
Badham is a fairly slick director with a knack for staging action. Except for a strangely murky sequence involving Harvey Keitel, he delivers the goods here.
Fonda gives the role all it needs. But it's sort of a thankless performance because Maggie is a comic book character. Love may turn a bad girl good, but Maggie doesn't have any real growing room. And some of the plot devices used to define her character are ridiculous. In one scene, she doesn't know how to shop in a grocery store so she tries to copy another shopper. The result is a grocery cart full of ravioli. Maggie may be in need of a little social mainstreaming and she may have been a junkie. But she apparently was not raised by wolves.
\ Viewers' Guide: **1/2
A Warner picture at Salem Valley 8 (389-0444) and Tanglewood Mall Cinema (989-6165). Rated R for sex and violence. 110 minutes.