Luc Besson is not an action director. He is a violence director, probably the best in the business right now. He discomfits a lot of people because he is always on the dangerous edge of aestheticizing psychopathically murderous behavior. It's a subject we prefer to see treated cartoonishly so that we can pretend our enjoyment of it is pure escapism.
Besson has a curious fondness for lost girls making their way in a brutal world. In La Femme Nikita his heroine was a drugged-out, teenage murderess- drifter rescued from the guillotine by an intelligence agency and given a new life as...