THE PROFESSIONAL
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Jean Reno, Natalie Portman, Gary Oldman, Danny Aiello. Screenplay/Director: Luc Besson.
I wonder if budget is at all a criterion for whether or not a movie can be considered an exploitation flick. Take THE PROFESSIONAL, for example. It boasts extremely glossy cinematography, a couple of recognizable name actors, and a couple of fairly impressive explosions. It's also basically about violence and cheap titilation, and features a central relationship between a middle-aged man and a twelve-year-old girl with a decidedly ambiguous sexual dimension. THE PROFESSIONAL is all over the map, and its pretensions of being about anything more than its most unpleasant elements simply make it all the more unpleasant.
THE PROFESSIONAL of the title is a New York hit man named Leon (Jean Reno), brutally efficient but also very isolated. One day he is forced to let someone into his life when a girl from his apartment building knocks on his door. Her name is Matilda (Natalie Portman), and the rest of her family has just been killed by crooked and very wired D.E.A. agent Norman Stansfield (Gary Oldman) after Matilda's father tried to rip him off. Leon reluctantly takes Matilda in, then begins to teach her his profession when she says that she wants to avenge the murder of her young brother. The two become closer, which makes them all the more vulnerable when Stansfield learns that they know too much, and sets out to eliminate them both.
Writer/director Luc Besson has gone this route before with his popular French import LA FEMME NIKITA, a slick potboiler about a female assassin. There is no question that Besson can make a great *looking* film; with the assistance of cinematographer Thierry Arbogast, he has created a film chock full of moody close-ups and evocative lighting. But beneath the shiny wrapper, there isn't nearly as much going on as Besson would like us to believe. The relationship between Leon and Matilda never clicks because neither one is given a character to develop. Leon is mostly a collection of quirky traits, all intended to show us that for a hired killer, he's really not so bad a guy: he drinks lots of milk, takes meticulous care of a potted plant, and enjoys Gene Kelly movies. Jean Reno succeeds at giving Leon a haunted and desperate quality, but he never makes an emotional connection to Matilda. Natalie Portman is all wrong for a part that called for a much grittier quality, but she doesn't have too much to work with, either.
Besson would have been better served spending more time trying to bring his characters to life, and less on feeble attempts at humor which are often embarrassing. A silly game between Leon and Matilda involving celebrity impersonations is completely out of place, as is a scene where Matilda shocks a hotel manager by announcing that Leon is her lover; character is thoroughly sacrificed for a cheap gag. Gary Oldman's entire part is something of a cheap gag, wild-eyed and way over the top, but at least he is interesting to watch. There isn't a real person to be found anywhere in THE PROFESSIONAL, which isn't always a problem in an action thriller, except that this one is trying to pass itself off as something more.
A more disconcerting problem with THE PROFESSIONAL is that it plays around with the sexuality of a twelve-year-old in a really distasteful way. There were only two real choices for dealing with that component of Leon and Matilda's relationship: confront it head on, or ignore it entirely. But Besson flirts and teases the audience with the idea that he's going to show them a forbidden love story, while choosing simply to focus his camera on Portman's rear end and dress her in skimpy clothing. This is to say nothing of the questionable decision to make it look like quality paternal time when Leon is teaching a child to load a 9mm pistol, or the blood which is spilled aplenty. A great deal of the time, THE PROFESSIONAL is just plain sleazy, and all the soft filters in the world can't disguise that fact.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 professionals: 3.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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