Point of No Return

Badham, however, keeps the whole thing up and running expertly -- it's interesting to note, also, that this Americanized version contains far more big-bang explosions and an elevated body-count than the French source material. Big deal. In a story as well done as this, a few extra bullet-hits only add to the delightful mayhem.

Badham uses faster cuts and cockeyed camera angles to give us Fonda's unsettled view of the world in the early scenes, then settles into a more conventional action vocabulary. He relies on stylish production design - Fonda's cell boasts a high-tech cantilevered bed - to suggest that this adventure is fantastic, even alien, to most sensibilities. (Besson used the opposite tack. His production design for the long training sequence of the film was naturalistic, his camera approaches quirky and alienated.) [19 March 1993, p.C]

I'm not convinced there was a compelling reason to remake La Femme Nikita. The original stands well on its own, and, having been made only a few years ago, it's definitely not dated. Nevertheless, mainstream American audiences hate subtitles, so this won't be the last foreign language film to receive this treatment. In terms of style and originality, Point of No Return can't compare to its inspiration, but, for a Hollywood thriller, it's more than adequate.

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then “Point of No Return,” a soulless, efficiently slavish remake of “La Femme Nikita,” creates a whole new category of homage-paying.

If they gave an Oscar for the most unnecessary movie of the year, the award for 1993 would have to go to "Point of No Return," the latest product of Hollywood's current mania for remaking successful recent foreign films. It's not that this movie is such an awful rehashing of "La Femme Nikita," Luc Besson's stylish French thriller that was the biggest foreign-language hit of 1990 in the United States. It's that the first movie had such high visibility and is still so fresh in our minds, and this Americanized version is so totally the same film (except for the ending, it's virtually scene for scene the same) that it seems like a criminal waste of $30 million. [19 March 1993]

Not good enough to be remembered past next week, not bad enough to get worked up about, “Point” is a factory product pure and simple, something to throw onto the screen until the next something comes along.

A technically slavish and totally atrocious Hollywood remake. [19 March 1993]