10 Great Assassin Movies Like Anna

Summary Anna is a thrilling and complex story of a government agent turned assassin, joining the ranks of other great spy movies like The Bourne Identity.

Luc Besson's Anna presents a unique view of the assassin world, combining double-crosses and Russian espionage for an exciting action-packed experience.

Films like Salt, The Killer, and John Wick show strong portrayals of skilled assassins, blending intense action with emotional depth and thrilling plots.

From John Wick to Atomic Blonde to The Bourne Identity, there are plenty of great action thrillers like Anna that explore the gruesome life of an assassin. Although it was released five years ago, Anna has found a whole new fan base since climbing the streaming charts on Netflix. Anna stars Sasha Luss as a government agent who uses her beauty to deceive her enemies and ends up becoming one of the most feared assassins in the world. It was written, directed, and produced by acclaimed action filmmaker Luc Besson in one of his finest recent efforts.

Anna is one of the best recent action movies about the assassin trade, but it’s far from the first. The world of Russian espionage was also tackled in the Jennifer Lawrence spy thriller vehicle Red Sparrow and the action-packed Kingsman prequel The King’s Man. The notion of a world-renowned killer was explored with Matt Damon’s amnesiac CIA assassin in The Bourne Identity and Michael Fassbender’s fearsome underworld figure in Netflix’s The Killer. There are a bunch of great assassin movies like Anna that get their audience to empathize with a hired killer.

Related Luc Besson’s Anna Ending & All Twists Explained In Luc Besson's Anna, the titular Russian assassin plays the KGB and CIA against each other. We explain the twists and turns of Anna's secret plan.

10 The King's Man

After helming two Kingsman movies set in the present day, Matthew Vaughn filled in the spy organization’s backstory in the World War I-set prequel The King’s Man. Ralph Fiennes stars as Orlando Oxford, a badass operative and founding member of the Kingsman agency, as he takes on Rasputin. He creates Kingsman to fight back against a cabal full of the most notorious figures from 20th-century history. Much like Anna, the plot revolves around a lot of double-crossing and Russian espionage.

Fiennes gives a compelling turn as an aristocrat-turned-spy amidst the high-octane action set-pieces, backed up by Rhys Ifans’ comic portrayal of Rasputin. Vaughn does a great job of mixing goofy, heightened Kingsman action with the real history of the First World War. The big bad tease at the end of the movie is the rise of Adolf Hitler.

9 The 355

From The A-Team to The Expendables, there are plenty of action movies about all-male mercenary squads going into battle together, but very few about an all-female team. The 355 set out to rectify that with its story of a group of female international spies joining forces to prevent the outbreak of World War III. The star-studded ensemble cast includes such legends as Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, and Lupita Nyong’o, all kicking butt in an uncharacteristic action role.

Not only does The 355 upend the stereotypical portrayal of women in action movies; it’s also a solid spy thriller having a lot of fun with the established tropes. Its plot might be recycled from the conventions of other spy films, but the action sequences are stunning – and the action is really the star of a movie like this. It’s a great Bond homage.

8 Salt

Angelina Jolie stars in Salt as a badass CIA agent named Evelyn Salt. After being falsely accused of plotting the assassination of the Russian president, Salt has to go on the run and try to prove her innocence. Salt received a lot of media attention upon its release, because its plot unintentionally mirrored some real-life events of that time, like the revelation of real Russian sleeper agents in the Illegals Program, with the Salt character being compared to an agent named Anna Chapman.

The action scenes are directed with razor-sharp precision by Phillip Noyce, and Jolie is fully believable as a CIA-trained killing machine. The plot is very convoluted, with a lot of muddled twists and turns, but Jolie makes it work. As usual, her magnetic star power and powerful acting talent elevate the material.

7 The Bourne Identity

Just when the James Bond series started going down a goofy rabbit hole full of far-fetched gadgets and ridiculous plotlines, The Bourne Identity came along with the perfect antidote. Matt Damon stars as an amnesiac assassin who wakes up with no memory of why he’s such a good killer. The gritty realism of The Bourne Identity and its sequels ended up revolutionizing the spy genre (and even led to a drastic tonal shift in the Bond series itself).

Much like Anna, The Bourne Identity is about a secret agent getting double-crossed and betrayed so many times that the only person they can trust is themselves. Jason Bourne might not know why he’s such a skilled killer, but he’s more than happy to use those skills to get answers. The Bourne Identity marked a great start to a great trilogy.

6 The Killer

David Fincher’s Netflix actioner The Killer stars Michael Fassbender as a stoic contract killer who travels the world taking down high-profile targets for competitive prices. At first, he seems to be the same cold-hearted hitman seen in countless other crime thrillers: he’s a loner, he kills without remorse, and he follows a rigid set of rules to avoid ever making a mistake. But, a few minutes into the movie, he makes the worst mistake possible and lands himself in a world of trouble.

This movie’s assassin is a satirical deconstruction of the usual archetype. He claims to follow these rules, but he breaks every single one of them in quick succession. He’s not as emotionless as he’d like to think, he’s not as meticulous as he’d like to think, and he starts getting too close to his targets. The Killer works as both a tense action thriller and a sly dark comedy.

5 Hanna

Joe Wright’s Hanna is a unique blend of hitman thriller and coming-of-age drama. Saoirse Ronan stars as the titular Hanna Heller, who’s been trained to kill since the age of two. When a top-ranking CIA agent sends a legion of goons to track her down and kill her, Hanna must go on the run. Along the way, she hides out with a vacationing family, who are completely unaware of her secret life as an assassin.

Although she’s a masterful killer, Hanna is still just a kid at heart. As she gets to know the family’s kids, she experiences friendship for the first time and has her first crush. Ronan gives a stellar performance as Hanna, nailing both the adolescent awkwardness, which she also captured perfectly in Lady Bird, and the gun-toting badassery of a Bourne-like assassin.

4 Léon: The Professional

Anna isn’t Luc Besson’s first movie about an assassin. He previously helmed Léon: The Professional, about a lonely hitman living in New York City. After a crooked DEA agent goes guns blazing into the apartment next door and his 12-year-old neighbor Mathilda is orphaned in the most brutal way possible, Léon reluctantly takes her under his wing. Léon begins to train Mathilda in his deadly trade as she plots her revenge against the DEA agent.

Jean Reno and Natalie Portman (in her feature film debut) share spectacular chemistry as an unorthodox father-daughter duo. Léon subverts the usual expectations of “lone wolf and cub” stories. Usually, the wolf is eager for the cub to follow in his violent footsteps. But Léon doesn’t want Mathilda to end up like him, and makes the ultimate sacrifice so that she won’t have to.

3 Atomic Blonde

After going uncredited for his co-directing work on John Wick, David Leitch made his official feature directorial debut with Atomic Blonde. Based on Antony Johnston and Sam Hart’s graphic novel The Coldest City, Atomic Blonde takes the high-octane style of John Wick’s action and transplants it into the Cold War. Charlize Theron stars as Lorraine Broughton, a top-level MI6 field agent trying to find a list of double agents in the final days before the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Theron gives a typically fantastic performance as Lorraine, capturing her grit and guile while also showing the devastating emotional impact of the violence. Leitch deftly handles each of the film’s intense action sequences with plenty of style and brutality from behind the camera. Theron and Leitch’s efforts come together to make a modern action movie classic.

2 Red Sparrow

After making three Hunger Games movies together, Jennifer Lawrence and director Francis Lawrence (no relation) reteamed for a very different movie: Red Sparrow, a nail-biting spy thriller with a controversial abundance of sex and violence. Lawrence (the actor) plays a former ballerina who becomes a Russian intelligence officer. She’s sent to charm and seduce a CIA officer, played by Joel Edgerton, in a bid to learn the identity of a mole.

Much like the title character in Anna, Red Sparrow’s Dominika Egorova uses her beauty to manipulate her targets. In Red Sparrow, this is rooted in the real-life history of Soviet sexpionage. Spies would use their sex appeal to get information out of enemy operatives. Red Sparrow uses this historical conceit to turn Dominika into the ultimate femme fatale, a role Lawrence knocks out of the park.

1 John Wick

The most iconic movie assassin of the past 10 years is the eponymous antihero in the John Wick franchise. While the sequels would take on an epic scope with globetrotting adventures to take down worldwide organizations, the first movie is the simple story of a grieving widower seeking revenge after the last remaining connection to his late wife is severed. When a bunch of gangsters break into his house and murder the adorable puppy his wife left for him, Wick springs back into action to exact vengeance.

Much like Anna, John Wick is a character-focused action thriller. Keanu Reeves earned a much-deserved career comeback with his sincere portrayal of the Baba Yaga, committing not only to the physicality of the action, but also the emotions of losing everything. John Wick is one of the defining works of modern action cinema.