Zoe Saldana was a rising star when she took the lead as a sexy assassin in Colombiana (2011), a revenge thriller from producer Luc Besson’s international action movie factory. But where his other productions tend to drop American badasses in European locales, this one reworks La Femme Nikita in a South American context. Saldana is […]
From Paris With Love (2009), starring John Travolta as a cowboy of an American agent and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as an ambitious but untrained low-level agent assigned to assist, is another of Luc Besson’s English language Euro-action films, the contemporary equivalent to the drive-in action movie of decades past. Besson has perfected the formula in […]
District B13 (2004), Pierre Morel’s twist on Escape From New York set in a near-future Paris, is a lean, clean, adrenaline and indignation-fueled B-movie action machine. Urban athlete David Belle, one of the creators of the extreme sport known as Parkour, stars as ghetto hero Leito and he set the tone, the pace, and the […]
The Transporter (2002) – Luc Besson, the rather pretentious yet stylish purveyor of high concept action cinema born in France, found his true niche when he created his own production company and turned into an action mogul. His pictures are generally swift and sleek and sometimes silly and he’s ably filling the gap left by […]
Luc Besson and his France-based, internationally-savvy EuropaCorp studio are the salvation of the unpretentious, mid-budget, hyper-charged action movie in America. Usually Besson is content to co-write and produce the films, which have launched careers of such protégés as Louis Letterier (The Transporter), Pierre Morel (Taken), and Olivier Megaton (Colombiana), but he takes charge of Lucy […]
