Foreign Film Review: 'Deadly Black Orchid'

Over the years, Luc Besson has become an accomplished filmmaker who has taken a backseat to a screenwriter's career, hoping to promote a French director who has become a global sensation, with the best of intentions. He has produced a series of genre-defining, commercially oriented screenplays that have been diluted with the flavour of French cinema, producing a Hollywood B-grade action film with a low to medium budget, with culturally accessible content and a universal visual language across regions, guaranteeing that his films will travel unhindered around the world.
But Luc Besson's shortcomings are also evident: he smells like a craftsman. Each film is a déjà vu structure, with just one or two occasional flashes of brilliance, and Luc Besson's artistry, which was so sophisticatedly laid out throughout the film, seems to have disappeared. Fatal Blackland is another of Luc Besson's painless screenplays. The film's pacing is skilfully controlled, the story is well developed, the acting is impeccable, and the female lead is a decent performance from Avatar star Zoe Saldana. However, the film is full of echoes of Luc Besson's old films, with scenes from his classic "This Killer Is Not Too Cold" being repeated, such as the two films in which Lori's family are all brutally murdered by gangsters, but with a twist - in "This" Lori is weak and helpless and turns to her neighbour's uncle for help, while in this film Lori unexpectedly In this film, the young girl takes the knife and goes straight to war with the gang and gets out of the clutches. Unlike the twists and turns of "This", this film becomes brutally direct, creating a sensory thrill at the expense of the story's minimal credibility. This slight difference is evident from the fact that the film fails to be a little quiet and calm, but instead seems to rush right out of the gate. The scene in which the heroine's uncle shoots in the street is similar to the situation in This, where Lori shoots indiscriminately out of the window, and both serve the same purpose, contributing to the psychological transformation of the character in an extreme way, making the killer Leon bow down and willingly become a killer teacher in This, and making Lori bow down and willingly enter the school as a student in this film. Using the same trick over and over again is the embodiment of craftsmanship, and Luc Besson repeats himself without blushing, including the scene in which the protagonist triumphantly escapes from a police siege, as he does. In terms of commercial pastiche, the film is passable, showing the heroine as a tough killer, but also finding the opportunity to show her flirtatious side by assigning her a boyfriend, with whom she will linger after a successful assassination mission. The film takes aim at the hot body of the lead actress, followed by a bite-sized sex scene. After all, violence and youthfulness are the twins of cinema, and this film is careful to balance the two in a way that makes the film commercially flirtatious.
There are one or two highlights, such as the two assassinations of the target, the first of which is a cleverly conceived attempt to infiltrate the prison, and the second of which has the target killed in the mouth of a shark. However, scenes like these are limited to sensory stimulation, and the aesthetic pleasure of the film is minimal, with mechanical parts assembled everywhere. The film's lack of characterisation or depth relegates it to the status of an ordinary member of a myriad of second-rate action films.