Plot
Nikita (Anne Parillaud) is a teenage junkie who participates in the robbery of a pharmacy owned by a friend's parents. The robbery goes awry, erupting into a gunfight with local police, during which her cohorts are killed. Suffering severe withdrawal symptoms, she murders a policeman. Nikita is arrested, tried, and convicted of murder and is sentenced to life in prison.
In prison, her captors fake her death, making it appear that she has committed suicide via a tranquilizer overdose. She awakens in a nondescript room, where a well-dressed but hard-looking man named Bob (Tchéky Karyo) enters and reveals that, although officially dead and buried, she is in the custody of a shadowy government agency known as the Centre. She is given the choice of becoming an assassin, or of actually occupying "row 8, plot 30", referring to her fake grave. After some resistance, she chooses the former and proves to be a talented killer. One of her trainers, Amande (Jeanne Moreau), transforms her from a degenerate drug addict to a femme fatale. Amande implies that she was also rescued and trained by the DGSE.
Her initial mission, killing a foreign diplomat in a crowded restaurant and escaping back to the Centre from his well-armed bodyguards, doubles as the final test in her training. She graduates and begins life as a sleeper agent in Paris with her boyfriend Marco (Jean-Hugues Anglade), a man she meets in a supermarket and who knows nothing of her real profession.
Her career as an assassin goes well until a document-theft mission in an embassy goes awry, requiring the Centre to send in Victor "The Cleaner" (Jean Reno), a ruthless assassin. Victor's task is to help Nikita salvage the mission and destroy all the evidence of the foul-up, but he is wounded by the embassy guards and dies during the escape. Marco reveals that he has discovered Nikita's secret life, and, concerned over how her activities are affecting her psychologically, persuades her to disappear. Upon discovering that she abandoned the agency, Bob meets with Marco, and they both discuss and decide what is best for Nikita.
Read more about this topic: Nikita (film)
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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