My Name Is Modesty is a 2003 American action film that was released direct-to-DVD. The film is based on the early years of the character Modesty Blaise

Modesty Blaise

Modesty Blaise is a British comic strip featuring a fictional character of the same name, created by Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway in 1963. The strip follows the adventures of Modesty Blaise, an exceptional young woman with many talents and a criminal past, and her trusty sidekick Willie Garvin...

, a former crime boss turned secret agent.

This is the third production that brings Peter O'Donnell

Peter O'Donnell

Peter O'Donnell was a British writer of mysteries and of comic strips, best known as the creator of Modesty Blaise, a female action hero/undercover trouble-shooter/enforcer...

's character Modesty Blaise to the screen, following the feature film Modesty Blaise

Modesty Blaise (1966 film)

Modesty Blaise was a comedic spy-fi motion picture produced in the United Kingdom and released worldwide in 1966. It was loosely based upon the popular comic strip Modesty Blaise by Peter O'Donnell, who wrote the original story and scenario upon which Evan Jones based his screenplay...

with Monica Vitti

Monica Vitti

Monica Vitti is an Italian actress best known for her starring roles in films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, her lover at that time, during the early 1960s...

 in 1966 and the TV pilot Modesty Blaise

Modesty Blaise (1982 film)

This version of Modesty Blaise is an American TV pilot program, intended to be the start of a TV series. It was written by Stephen Zito, directed by Reza Badigi, with Barney Rosenzweig as Executive Producer...

with Ann Turkel

Ann Turkel

Ann Kathryn Turkel is an American actress and model.Turkel studied at the Musical Theatre Academy.She was photographed for American Vogue...

 in 1982.

Premise

The film stars British actress Alexandra Staden as Modesty and chronicles a crucial event in the character's life some time prior to the start of the comic strip.

Cast

• Alexandra Staden
• Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
• Raymond Cruz
  Raymond Cruz
  Raymond Cruz is a Mexican American actor. He is mostly known for playing military roles. Since 2005 he has been a regular cast member on the TV series The Closer, playing the character Detective Julio Sanchez...
  
  
• Fred Pearson
• Eugenia Yuan
  Eugenia Yuan
  -Biography:A Hong Kong Film Awards winner and daughter of martial arts legend Cheng Pei Pei, Eugenia Yuan started out her career not as an actress, but as a rhythmic gymnast for the U.S...
  
  
• Valentin Teodosiu
• Bianca Ana Tudorica

Production

After director Scott Spiegel

Scott Spiegel

Scott Spiegel is an American screenwriter, film director, producer and actor. He is best known for co-writing the screenplay for the movie Evil Dead II with longtime friend, film director Sam Raimi, with whom he attended Wylie E. Groves High School in Birmingham, Michigan...

 filmed From Dusk till Dawn 2

From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money

From Dusk till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money is a 1999 American horror film and the sequel to From Dusk till Dawn. It was co-written and directed by Scott Spiegel, co-writer of Evil Dead 2 and director of Intruder....

in 1999, producer Harvey Weinstein

Harvey Weinstein

Harvey Weinstein, CBE is an American film producer and movie studio chairman. He is best known as co-founder of Miramax Films. He and his brother Bob have been co-chairmen of The Weinstein Company, their film production company, since 2005...

 asked Spiegel to direct My Name Is Modesty. Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...

 joined the filming as an executive producer. Filming took place in Bucharest, Romania and lasted 18 days. The film was produced pro forma for Miramax Films

Miramax Films

Miramax Films is an American entertainment company known for distributing independent and foreign films. For its first 14 years the company was privately owned by its founders, Bob and Harvey Weinstein...

 to maintain rights to the source material, the Modesty Blaise

Modesty Blaise

Modesty Blaise is a British comic strip featuring a fictional character of the same name, created by Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway in 1963. The strip follows the adventures of Modesty Blaise, an exceptional young woman with many talents and a criminal past, and her trusty sidekick Willie Garvin...

comic strip.

Release

My Name Is Modesty was released straight to DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

. Juan Morales of The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

called the film one of the "vivid examples of Mr. Spiegel’s sly, visual directing style". Joe Leydon of Variety

Variety (magazine)

Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...

opined that the film "isn't half-bad" and is a "mildly diverting time-killer". He went on to note, "Scripters Lee and Janet Scott Batchler concoct a scenario that often plays like the pilot for a syndicated teleseries. Budgetary and scheduling restraints require vet vidpic director Scott Spiegel... to keep most of the action within the casino set. Still, Spiegel sustains a reasonable level of tension while Modesty stalls for time. Climactic smackdown is suitably brisk, if predictable. Handsome lensing by Vivi Dragan Vasile is a plus."