In cult Continental thriller Nikita, Anne Parillaud is the junkie street punk executed for killing a cop, only to awaken as an intern on a secret government assassination squad. Upon release her violent tendencies are channelled for patriotic purposes, all the time masked from her newly found lover, John-Hugues Anglade.

In The Assassin, Hollywood's action-boy-for-rent John Badham has Bridget Fonda killed and resurrected as the killing machine, with love interest in Dermot Mulroony's J.P. This US remake of French director Luc Besson's best known movie is far more than a basic rehash, seeming at times to stray perilously close to being a simple redubbing job -- setting for setting, colour for colour, clothing for clothing. Little separates the two.

All this is obvious from the opening seconds: one of the key sequences in the Besson picture has a junkie gang shoot it out with police in an icy-blue-lit drugstore. Three years later Badham restages the piece with unerring accuracy, picking up on all the detail of his template but eschewing the power that makes the former such a thrilling piece of cinema. The key difference, with typical American overstatement, is the addition of a neon sign that helpfully blinks DRUGS. This is a trait the film persists in all through its run -- there is a slight tweaking, a slight embellishment all the time; where the Frenchman was willing to let his audience do the work, his American cousin hammers the point home with an iron fist.

On the plus side, Fonda makes a valid stab at the central role, successfully affecting the metamorphosis from street to sophisticate much as her predecessor, but at times seems to be taking her cues directly from Parillaud so that her performance has more the quality of an impressive impersonation than anything particularly valid in itself. That said, she more often than not twists the part into something more appealing than before, making her more sympathetic, if consequently less believable. And Mulroony is more pretty-boy than the gullible Anglade, the quirky emotionalism of the first film giving way here to a likeable airbrushed flatness. Only in the uneasy dinner-party scene where he shares a table with Fonda and her controller Bob (posing as an uncle) does the new film add anything substantial, the macho vocal sparring both light and ironic.

As the Svengali Bob, Gabriel Byrne takes over from Tcheky Karyo, but Badham never achieves the same pull as Besson (being both Parrilaud's then director and lover). And the replacement of veteran Jeanne Moreau as the assassin's 'femininity' teacher with Anne Bancroft carries about it a whiff of embarrassment, lines that sound just-convincingly poetic in French coming across as simply awkward here.

The Assassin does score on a couple of occasions, however. The eminently loopy scene where Nikita keeps her lover at bay outside a hotel bathroom door while she guns down a target from the window is seamlessly transposed to New Orleans and has a notable adrenaline rush behind it. And in the all-stops out bungled-climactic job, The Cleaner called in to sort the mess is here essayed in a brief but welcome cameo by the redoubtable Harvey Keitel with a stone-faced surreal that is horribly-funny.

No one would expect a bad film as such from an old hand like Badham, and nor is The Assassin bad as such, but what was clearly ridiculous about the original was at least veiled by its subtitles and relentless stylishness. Here such niceties are bludgeoned to make way for a slick, loud Hollywood thriller that so dots all the i's and crosses the t's on its journey to the screen that it loses any semblance of real invention or excitement. Not so much poor, then, as 'why?'