Point of No Return (1993)

Point of No Return arrives in 1993 with a premise that had already been executed once, and better, by Luc Besson. Bridget Fonda plays Maggie Hayward, a convicted cop killer pulled from the lethal injection table by a clandestine agency that fakes her death and rebuilds her as a contract assassin. She learns posture, cutlery, and computer terminals. She kills a man in a restaurant and escapes down a laundry chute. It is brisk, competent, and entirely content to be a genre picture. The film has no interest in interrogating the arrangement at its center, in which a woman is owned, trained, and deployed by men who regard her as equipment. That arrangement is simply the plot.

The supporting cast includes Lorraine Toussaint and Olivia D'Abo, and the presence of a Black actress and a woman in operational roles registers as ordinary 1993 casting practice, not as a statement. The antagonist is an Iranian arms magnate, a stock figure of the era's villain economy, offered without a syllable of reflection. Nina Simone's recordings thread through the soundtrack, a choice that flatters the film's taste without asking anything of its conscience. Anne Bancroft's etiquette coach is a pleasant turn. None of it accumulates into an argument.

The film's omissions instruct as much as its inclusions. There is no sermon on the prison system that produced Maggie, no reckoning with the economics of the military-industrial apparatus that employs her, no environmental anxiety, no meditation on embodiment, no neurological taxonomy. The screenplay delivers its premise and gets out of the way. Roger Ebert noted a persistent deja vu, and he was right, though the sensation comes from fidelity to the source. This is a well-made thriller about a woman with a gun and a handler with a clipboard. It asks nothing of the audience beyond attention, and in 1993 that was still considered sufficient.