This movie doesn’t get enough appreciation. Possible spoilers ahead.
I love The Professional because it manages to be one kickass action movie while still showing sensitivity and good character development. Characters especially.
I love the way Leon can knife a man point-blank without changing his expression, yet drinks a glass of milk and waters his plant every morning.
I love the scene with Matilda dancing around in bike shorts doing her Madonna impression. It shows her little-kid innocence and hints at the ruthless, seductive hit (wo)man she could grow up to be. And how about the part where she spoiler obiterated******* with the paper bag? That took guts.
There’s so much I could talk about - there has to be something wrong in the universe, because this movie is just too damned good!
::Tapswiller reveals himself to be a sick and depraved individual::
Natalie Portman was unbeleivably sexy…
::doesn’t he realize she was twelve years old?::
…and sophisticated. There is no way she was as young as she was supposed to be.
::she was twelve, you pervert!::
Though come to think of it, she still looked pretty young in The Phantom Menace(in which her performance was as flat as the rest of the cast,BTW)…Hmmm…
::does the math::
Oh, man. I am a sick and depraved individual.
Still, a great flick, as the OP says, with wonderful action scenes and excellent acting and direction. Though the story was not exactly original.
The scene where Leon does the John Wayne impression is great. Gary Oldman was such a bastard, god he’s good, hehe. All in all one of the best anti-hero movies around.
I thought that Leon was amazing in that movie. I didn’t see Natalie as anything other than a cute-Hollywood-little-girl. Her acting wasn’t spectacular, but then, I don’t expect spectacular acting from a twelve year old. Any deficencies in her part, though, Leon more than made up for. It takes a damn good piece of artwork to make a hired killer look like a fundamentally decent fellow.
I bawled uncontrollably the first time I ran across this movie on cable one Sunday afternoon. The ending was just too much for me to take. Somehow Leon’s character sucked me in, there was much more to him than the surface…one of the most underrated movies and performances ever. I guess it really took me by surprise, I was not expecting the touching story.
Okay…I loved the movie before I saw Leon. That’s the movie which was cut-up to be made into The Professional, which was released in North America. Now, The Professional is still a great flick itself, but if you like it, definitely check out Leon, the version that was released everywhere else. They cut out 24 minutes for The Professional, and those scenes really develop the characters and story much more.
I think Jean Reno really makes the film, though how him and Natalie Portman play off of each other is great. I can totally understand why, after working with him in Nikita, Luc Besson wrote the flick with him in mind.
What interests me about the film is that it made no bones about life being absolutely dirt cheap. It was one scene of gorgeous coreographed mass murder after another, until in the end it was taken for granted that nobody’s lives mattered except for those of two people who cared about eachother.
I saw this film as a sneak preview-- and one of the projectors broke down during the first reel. The entire audience sat through it with a 5 to 15 minute break every 20 or 25 minutes-- and we all stayed there to the absolute end.
It was still the best movie-going experience I had that year.
Nothing much to add except yeah - wow what a movie -
Favorite bits:
The shot in the opening sequence where the fat mafia don is backing up totally freaked out, trying to dial the phone, and out of the shadows behind him you see a knife - then a hand, and then finally Leon in his sunglasses. Then the reverse as he leaves…
I remember the gasp in the theatre as this unassuming little european man in his coat and hat takes off the coat to reveal that leather vest with all the grenades and guns…
The absolute heart throughout the movie…
Oldham in his “playing piano on the mantle” scene - either a foreshadowing or a nod to “Immortal Beloved”
The fact that in addition to being an anti-hero in the “good guy is a killer” he’s also an anti-hero in that he’s not particularly good looking, his accent isn’t “classicaly sexy”, etc. etc.
Natalie Portman pulled off her character beautifully - I agree that her acting was at her age level, but she didn’t try to be more than she was. And Yes, she was damned cute, and needed to pull that off in the context of the movie. My thought throughout was “This is what Nabokov was talking about”.
A small bit, and I know that 90% of the world hates Sting, but throughout the movie the background music kept tugging at my ear - it sounded like something I knew, but I couldn’t place my finger on it. It was based on the credit track: “Shape of my Heart”. The Set-Up/Hit of the background leading into SomH at the end layed me out. I don’t think I was able to move for 10 minutes. It helps that SomH is in my top 5 as best song ever written.
Luc Besson has been the president of the Jean Reno Fan Club for a long time now. Remember The Big Blue, or La Femme Nikita (which seemed to foreshadow The Professional in it’s portrayal of Reno as “the cleaner”)?
What got me was the too-human side of Leon, getting ripped off by his “employers” because he wasn’t that smart. Man, I was rooting for the hit man the whole time!
I am going to find a copy of Leon this weekend. I assume it will be in French? I hope so, I prefer Besson in French, even if it means I can’t look away for a second!
Count me in the group of people who feel this film was vastly underrated. It had suprising depth. I’m always impressed with actors who can express much in the smallest facial movment or posture.
Leon is still in English, and very much a better film for being uncut. Actually showing Mathilda accompanying Leon on routine “work” was paradoxically less creepy than The Professional largely leaving those out, a similar situation with other scenes cut out. The cut-up American version left me feeling very vaguely creeped out by the Lolita undertones throughout; the intact film, not remotely so–the care that Leon takes with her crush on him, the sadness underlying her trying to grow up so fast, all of that comes out much more strongly in the full version.