La Femme Nikita

In anticipation of American Ultra, check out an earlier film about a seemingly ordinary person thrust into the life of a super spy/assassin, Luc Besson's extremely entertaining and stylish 1990 action-thriller starring Anne Parillaud.

The serpentine plot begins its 117-minute slither when punkish, psychotic, and drug-ridden Nikita fires her gun into a cop's face following the stick-up of a drug store, and is promptly imprisoned. She is thrown into a dank cell, then injected with a substance and told it is a lethal toxin. Instead of dying, however, the comes to in an all-white interrogation room, where French intelligence officer Bob (Tchéky Karyo), informs her that an alternate to execution exists: she can receive covert government training as an assassin.