The tragic loss of actor River Phoenix at such a young age is something I think about every time I see one of his films. I tend to imagine that Brad Pitt wound up fitting into the niche Phoenix was building for himself, and had he not died from a massive drug overdose at the age of 23 we could easily have seen him playing the parts that went to Pitt in Seven, or 12 Monkeys.

When you grow up in the 1980s with an ardent River Phoenix fan for a sibling, you wind up seeing every film that he made. For the record, Stand By Me (1986) was his best film. A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988) was probably his worst. In the middle there was Little Nikita, a 1988 thriller directed by Richard Benjamin and co-starring Sidney Poitier, Richard Jenkins, and Caroline Kava.

Phoenix plays Jeffrey N. Grant, a wilful high schooler with plans to join the Air Force Academy upon graduation. Meanwhile a rogue Soviet agent, nicknamed “Scuba” (Richard Lynch), is blackmailing his former masters by murdering Russian spies and sleeper agents across the USA – including Jeffrey’s parents (Jenkins and Kava). Poor Jeffrey is entirely unaware of his parents’ history as well as his own identity, until he comes into contact with the FBI agent Roy Parmenter (Poitier) who is seeking revenge of Scuba for killing his partner.

While Little Nikita boasts a great premise – all-American kid discovers his parents are Russian spies – the narrative that is created from this basic idea is an unnecessarily convoluted one. Rather than find a story where Jeffrey’s parents are pressed into service against the USA, they are instead targets of a fairly random rogue spy and seem to have entirely abandoned their training as servants to the USSR. At the same time the film introduces a KGB handler named Konstantin (Richard Bradford), whose primary focus is not the Grant family but recapturing Scuba. Parmenter – who really should be pursuing the Grants himself – is instead also chasing Scuba, and does not seem particularly concerned about sleeper agents literally on his doorstep.

At the centre of this entire escapade is Jeffrey himself, nominally the protagonist of the film but curiously passive throughout the story. We see him get emotional about things, and loudly argue with Parmenter a lot, and Phoenix is generally pretty decent with what he has been given, but truth be told if he was excised from the plot completely nothing else would change. He is a spectator of the story, and not ever an active participant in it.

The screenplay also seems very lazily researched, with no real idea on how anything works whether Air Force recruitment, international espionage, the FBI, or even computers.

Despite Phoenix’s efforts and a generally very talented cast, Little Nikita is over-complicated and poorly written. Richard Benjamin was always a journey director, without significant flair and usually working in comedy (The Money Pit, My Stepmother is an Alien). Undertaking a thriller is completely out of his comfort zone, and he brings nothing that compensates for the material.

Poitier and Phoenix would later re-team for the vastly superior Sneakers (1992). Little Nikita is now largely – and understandably – forgotten.