Nikita

Nikita Taylor (Anne Parillaud) is a teenage delinquent and heroin addict who participates in robbing the pharmacy of the parents of a fellow junkie. The robbery goes awry, degenerating to a gunfight with local police during which her cohorts are killed. Suffering severe withdrawal symptoms, she shoots a policeman. Nikita is arrested, tried, convicted of murder, and imprisoned for life, with parole considered after thirty years.

In prison, she is drugged to simulate a death sentence; she awakens in a nondescript room. A well-dressed, hard man (Tchéky Karyo) enters and reveals that, although officially dead and buried after suicide by overdose, she is in custody of the DGSE, the French intelligence agency. She is given a choice: work as a DGSE assassin or be killed. After some resistance, she chooses the former and proves to be a talented killer. One of her trainers, Amande (Jeanne Moreau), transforms her from grimy gutter trash to femme fatale; Amande was also rescued and recruited by the DGSE.

Her initiation mission, killing a diplomat in a crowded restaurant and escaping back to the Centre, is the film's highlight; she is graduated and begins life as a sleeper agent in Paris with her boyfriend (Jean-Hugues Anglade), a man she meets in a supermarket and who knows nothing of her real profession.

Her assassin's career continues well, until an embassy document-theft goes awry, requiring the ruthless participation of 'Victor: The Cleaner' (Jean Reno) in destroying the mission's evidence and all corpses; The Cleaner is wounded and dies; Nikita abandons the Agency, the city of Paris, and her supermarket cashier boyfriend.