retroaction:
the professional
stargate |
director/screenwriter
Luc Besson
producer
Patrice Ledoux
cinematographer
Thierry Arbogast
music
Eric Serra
editor
Sylvie Landra
cast
Jean Reno (Léon)
Gary Oldman (Norman Stansfield)
Natalie Portman (Mathilda)
Danny Aiello (Tony)
Peter Appel (Malky)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 110m
u.s.
release: November 18,
1994
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other luc
besson films
reviewed on this website:
- the
fifth element
other roland
emmerich films
reviewed on this website:
- the
day after tomorrow
- godzilla
- independence
day
- the
patriot
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American critics have been
unkind to the young French director Luc Besson (he's still only
35, and he made his debut in 1983), who had a crossover hit four
years ago with La Femme Nikita. A blockbuster overseas
and an art-house hit here, it met with some snobbery (Terrence
Rafferty's entire review was this: "The end of French cinema
as we know it"), and the American remake, Point
of No Return, was similarly slammed. Have reviewers gotten
so jaded, so reflexive in their disdain for any action
movie, that they can't distinguish stylish, smartly-paced action
from the latest dud based on a video game? Besson has now directed
his first American film, The Professional, and while it's
not great (Quentin Tarantino has forever spoiled us for movies
about hit-men), it's hardly as offensive as many critics are
saying.
The Professional is high-concept in a way that made me
cringe whenever I saw ads for it: Assassin Leon (Jean Reno) takes
orphaned 12-year-old Mathilda (Natalie Portman) under his wing
after slimy DEA thugs (led by Gary Oldman) murder her family.
Twenty-five words or less. And the plot motor has whiskers; we
know that Leon will learn to love and Mathilda will learn self-reliance.
But the movie is cool about its subject. Besson likes to see
what happens to killers-for-hire when domesticity is imposed
on them -- Nikita endured charm school and almost became a housewife,
and Leon is forced into a father-mentor role. Besson still hasn't
taken full wing with this theme, the way John Huston did in Prizzi's
Honor, but that was a comedy and Besson isn't a comedian.
He's a brutal sensualist of the Walter Hill/John Woo school.
Some of the sequences, such as an army of cops converging on
Leon (in a faux-Scarface climax), are so hyperbolic they're
funny; they're a relief from the artificial tension of the story,
which rarely makes sense. An early image of sunlight slicing
through bullet holes in a wall might be Besson's way of one-upping
Blood
Simple; Besson makes smoother American junk movies than
most Americans do these days.
Overall, the movie is better than I'd anticipated. Given the
sticky premise, it shouldn't work, but Besson believes in it
-- either that or he believes in the big action scenes made possible
by the premise (which amounts to the same thing). There's conviction
in this movie, and intelligence. It's square, but not in the
overstuffed way that StarGate is square. After all, what
is Leon (who's simple at heart and illiterate) but a heavily
armed Forrest
Gump? Jean Reno consistently underplays Leon, and he
has a great long face that fascinates the camera; he's like a
scrawny Stallone, whom he often resembles vocally as well --
he has some of Stallone's pre-'80s sweetness, before Sly's spirit
got as hard as his body. (Reno is most appealing when he's entranced
by an old Gene Kelly movie -- he has the rapt expression of a
boy watching his first Disney.) This soft-spoken but kinetic
actor is a worthy vehicle for what appears to be Besson's new
chosen theme (the headaches of an assassin), but unlike Nikita,
he has no anger; that's reserved for Mathilda.
Probably thanks to Natalie Portman, whose film debut this is,
Mathilda doesn't come across as a baby Nikita. She has more cause
to be vicious and enraged than the nihilistic Nikita did, but
she just wants justice -- though the Besson twist is that she
wants revenge for the death of her little brother, not for the
murders of her moronic father, stepmother, and stepsister. (The
four-year-old boy's fate is about the only death Besson spares
us.) Besson doesn't overdraw on her cuteness, though he is a
little too stuck on Mathilda's romantic yearnings and alienation.
As written, Mathilda is usually unreadable and sometimes idiotic
(she marches into the DEA offices with a variety of hidden guns
-- does she seriously believe she could assassinate the villain
and get away clean?), but Portman somehow makes us understand
Mathilda's eagerness to enter the same violent life that killed
her brother. She's like the boy in Time Bandits: Life
gets scarier and more exciting when an outlaw enters the picture.
The Professional keeps going on the power of its performances,
but one actor threatens to bring everything crashing down. Is
it my imagination, or has Gary Oldman started to gobble bad 'shrooms
before each take? He was pretty funny as the corrupt, wired sap
in last year's Romeo Is Bleeding, but that same oily intensity
is used here to try to send shivers up our spines. Oldman is
introduced with his back to the camera, a time-honored movie
device to establish evil. And he's evil, all right -- so much
so that I wondered how he never blows his cover. Oldman's gelatinous
performance throws the film out of whack; you can't believe that
this pill-popping ding-dong would inspire loyalty among his partners
in crime. He's a cartoon bad guy with a set of fancy traits;
he listens to Beethoven before moving in for the kill -- a nod
to A Clockwork Orange, I guess.
Besson's characters have names, but they don't really need them.
Besson treats them as action-film archetypes: The Hit-Man, The
Girl, The Bad Cop. On the evidence of this movie and Nikita,
Luc Besson seems to want to do for the action genre what Sergio
Leone did for Westerns in the '60s: inflate the clichés,
present them with an air of parody, and yet honor the genre.
Essentially, I've seen The Professional a few times before;
its closest antecedent is John Cassavetes' Gloria, from
1980, about a little boy who runs afoul of gangsters and is protected
by a tough female detective. In that movie, there was some wit
in the way Gena Rowlands rolled her eyes at the kid's budding
machismo. The Professional goes back to the films Gloria
poked fun at.
Leon and Mathilda don't even go through the obligatory period
of hating each other, then grudgingly bonding. The attraction
is immediate and mutual (though, I hasten to add, platonic),
and before long he gives in to her demands that he train her
as a hit-girl. I doubt there's any calculation in this; like
his contemporaries -- Tarantino, Spike Lee, Tim Burton -- Besson
makes the movies he wants to see. Sergio Leone was well into
his forties by the time he made his Dollars trilogy, and
critics sniffed at those, too. Besson has years ahead of him,
and in Jean Reno he may have found his Clint Eastwood. And if
not Jean Reno, then Natalie Portman.
 I know this is heresy, but Star
Wars isn't a great movie. (KABOOM. Whew, that lightning
just missed me.) Its first sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, may deserve
that overworked label, but Star Wars was just that --
star wars -- and if you were ten or under, you thought it was
the best thing this side of a birthday party. It wasn't; it was
just a rehash of adventure-serial tricks that a generation of
kids was seeing for the first time. (The same was true of the
more openly parodic, and thus more satisfying, Indiana Jones
series.)
All of this is an effort to
explain why StarGate, a heavy and boring new space opera
directed by Roland Emmerich (Universal Soldier), is scoring
with kids and twentysomethings. Kids, of course, won't recognize
the constant swipes from Star Wars, Dune,
Flash Gordon, and every other fantasy film of the past
two decades; to them it's Star Wars 2, like Woodstock
2 for Gen-Xers who weren't around for the first one. Twentysomethings,
on the other hand, may enjoy StarGate because Gen-X is
nostalgic for anything that smells like the '70s, and StarGate
is certainly as mythical-lightweight as Star Wars. Actually,
it comes closer to the TV rip-off Battlestar Galactica
(which some Gen-Xers loved as kids and look back on fondly).
I apologize for the following sentence, but it's my duty. James
Spader is an Egyptologist pressed into service by the government
to decode a series of symbols that will activate a giant ring
leading to another world. (Whew.) Kurt Russell, a bitter colonel
wracked with guilt over his little boy's death (the kid shot
himself playing with Kurt's gun), leads a platoon accompanying
Spader to a desert planet ruled by Jaye Davidson with Darth Vader
voice enhancements. (Whew.) StarGate is loud and convoluted,
and unless you get off on special effects the only reason to
see it is James Spader, who underplays and rescues his scenes
just as he rescued his other big-budget beast this year, Wolf.
Russell, in his Falling
Down buzz-cut, looks vaguely embarrassed yet hopeful
that StarGate will continue the box-office streak that
Tombstone began. It will. But he shouldn't respect himself
in the morning.
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