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Besson sees Anna as a star vehicle for Russian model Luss, who he used as an alien in Valerian, and as rote as the script might be, one can still imagine what the right choice of actor might have brought to the material. The similarly themed Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow were both deeply flawed, but Charlize Theron and Jennifer Lawrence elevated them effortlessly, both bringing old-fashioned star presence to projects that didn’t deserve them. Luss appears in virtually every scene of Anna, and in not a single one of them does she prove worthy of such a task. She’s a black hole at the centre of the film, her performance so sedate and lifeless that it sucks all the energy right out of a thriller that should be jacked up with adrenaline. As her duelling love interests, Cillian Murphy (Irish but playing American) and Luke Evans (Welsh but playing Russian but sounding Scottish) struggle to rise above the dross they signed up to which leaves it up to Mirren to have some campy fun as a heartless anti-matriarch figure, spouting lines like “Trouble never sends a warning!” and having more fun than anyone else in the film or the audience.