Little Nikita

Richard Benjamin – 1988 – USA

Unoriginal piece of Cold War-era fluff, presumably intended to tap into the youth market with a type of film that normally featured Clint Eastwood or Gene Hackman in the lead role.  What’s particularly unfortunate is that River Phoenix, who plays the hero, was one of the best actors of his generation – (pretty much the only one from that time, as far as I can remember, who was legitimately compared to James Dean or Sal Mineo), and yet in this film he turns in probably his worst performance.  It would be easy to lay the blame at director Benjamin’s doorstep, since everyone else in the film, including veteran Sidney Poitier, are equally bad, so I think I will just do that.  Phoenix plays an all-American teenager who gets accepted into Air Force college and is recruited by Poitier to spy on his parents, who in turn are sleeper Soviet spies.  Nothing really interesting happens and the film is completely undecided as to whether it’s supposed to be a serious family drama or a tongue-in-cheek espionage comedy like Gotcha! (1985).  What’s doubly ironic is that Phoenix starred in another film the very same year, Sidney Lumet’s excellent Running On Empty (1988), in which he also plays a teen who has to deal with the consequences of his parents’ radical politics.  The difference between the two films is like night and day.  Granted, Little Nikita isn’t trying to do the same things as Running on Empty, but it fails badly at whatever else it was trying to do anyway.