Nikita

• Director: Danny Cannon
• Screenwriter/Written By: Craig Silverstein
• Producer: Marc David Alpert
• Starring: Lyndsy Fonseca, Maggie Q, Shane West
• Running Time: 60 mins.
• Language: English

Nikita is composed of all the well-worn Hollywood spy thrillers clichés you can think of: Every. Single. One.

Think of a plot element that’s been featured in at least a dozen spy films and its here. If it isn’t, it will be by the time the show runs its course—I promise.

The show follows a talented government agent who, of course, goes rogue after the people she works for try to kill her. In this case, her name is Nikita, played by Maggie Q, who you may have seen kicking Bruce Willis’s butt in Live Free or Die Hard. She’s basically Jason Bourne, minus the amnesia, with the addition of a few obligatory skimpy bikinis and low cut cocktail dresses. She’s the kind of woman who can wear heels and off faceless henchman at the same time. You know the type.

Nikita’s mission is to take down her former keepers, a secret government agency called The Division, and free all of its operatives. The Division recruits young people who are bright, unattached, troubled, yet inexplicably sexy, to become trained killers. Among the agencies latest recruits is a young woman named Alex (Lyndsy Fonseca, Kick-Ass, Hot Tub Time-Machine) whom Nikita is secretly communicating with on the inside. Michael (Shane West, A Walk to Remember) is a high up member of The Division who used to work with Nikita and is responsible for tracking her down.

The fact that none of this sounds original isn’t surprising: Nikita is the revival of the La Femme Nikita brand, which began as a film by Frenchman Luc Besson in 1990, then became a TV series, which aired from 1997-2001. It seems that the reboot, remake, trend in Hollywood is now in full swing on the small-screen as well.

The acting in Nikita is passable but shaky at times, which is the fault of the writers as much as anyone; it takes a lot of talent for actors to make mediocre dialogue sound convincing. Shane West seems to be doing an impression of the numerous gravelly voiced “bad guy” roles we are all used to, while Lyndsy Fonseca sometimes struggles to project the kind of world-weary street smarts her character is supposed to possess.

Maggie Q, as Nikita, does the best out of the three leads. She has the physicality and sex appeal necessary to sell the character and does most of her own stunts. Her performances during the fast paced action scenes are easily the best part of the show.

You may be asking yourself something like, “If Nikita is so derivative, why give it a relatively positive review?” In short, it’s because Nikita delivers exactly what it promises: a slick, weekly B-movie type experience that doesn’t cost the 10-12 dollars it does to see something similar on the big screen.

It’s been said that the goal of any TV show is to have a plot where you can wash the dishes and still follow it. By this standard, Nikita should win an Emmy.