Director: Luc Besson
Writer: Luc Besson
Cast: Jean Reno, Natalie Portman, Gary Oldman, Danny Aiello
Runtime: 110 mins.
1994
Never before has my enjoyment of a movie been so utterly depleted by a soundtrack. Starting with the second or third scene, I began to notice how much the impact of every moment was thwarted by the music propping it up. It's like a sociopathic nine year old watched the movie, was forced to write down four word descriptions of every scene, and that was all the information composer Eric Serra had with which to score this film. We are treated to a buffet of saccharine strings, balanced by a healthy dose of cliche Italian music, rounded out by a sprinkle of cliche Asian music for no particular reason. The score repeatedly made me feel bad any time I considered investing in a scene. The movie wants to be a slick thriller with heart, but the soundtrack belongs to a bargain bin knock-off of The Sopranos.
The rest of the movie is not all that bad. We have professional immigrant hitman Leon (Jean Reno) who primarily kills his quarries by being somewhere above them when they think he is somewhere in front of them. We have young Mathilda (Natalie Portman*) who has lost her family and is hellbent on revenge, so she tries to learn the business from Leon. And we have career dirty cop Stansfield (Gary Oldman), the perpetrator of the killings, who is really more of an explicit mobster than a crooked enforcer of the law. When dead bodies pile up around him, he gets interrogated by fellow officers, but then he just screams that he's busy and goes away.
*I saw her name in the opening credits, but totally forgot about it until the end of the movie. She's the little girl! It's just like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.**
**It really is like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver but far less intentional; the movie sexualizes Portman's character in all sorts of weird and uncomfortable ways.
As far as I can tell this is writer/director Luc Besson's breakout film. In a few years he would go on to make the cult classic The Fifth Element, and more recently the apparently boneheaded but beautiful Lucy. That seems to be this guy's MO: movies that have a flair for style, but are all over the place with their tone and pacing. Leon the Professional*** sometimes tries to be Tarantino's True Romance and sometimes tries to be Vin Diesel's The Pacifier, a blend that works poorly but not as poorly as you would imagine.
***Or Leon: The Professional if you believe IMDB, or simply The Professional if you believe the title card at the beginning of the film.
Two things in particular elevate The Professional above the mess it should degenerate into. One is Besson's aforementioned stylistics. His dialogue tends to be clunky as all hell, but he's got a great eye for characterization through camerawork, and his action scenes are satisfyingly propulsive. He really ought to consider stepping back out of the director's chair and doing some DP work.
The other elevating factor is the acting. Reno does his job well enough (one of his few strong moments of characterization is a shot of his wide-eyed gaping at an old-timey musical in a movie theater), and Portman is incredibly dynamic despite being given some awful lines to chew on. But I'm mostly thinking of a fellow named Gary Oldman. His sociopathic killer eats up every scene he's in and spits it out with a grin. Oldman is a master of electrifying genre silliness. He piles quirks onto a character that he could have easily sleepwalked through. The long stretches when he's not onscreen only enhance the moments he shows up. It's hard not to believe that Oldman's casting in The Professional wasn't riding the wave of his glorious extended cameo as a psychotic pimp in the previous year's True Romance.
He has a wonderful bit where he goes into a murderous frenzy by channeling Beethoven, then afterwards has a conversation with one of his victims about the various strengths of Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms in such situations. This moment could have only been improved if that asshat composer had actually scored the scene with some goddamned Beethoven instead of whatever sinister tripe he inserted. Oldman is literally waving his hands about as he hears Beethoven in his head. It's right there on the page. How could you not give us any Beethoven in this moment. I haven't seen a scoring flub this obvious since a flash-whatever in an episode of LOST that was all about Jack (I think) going to see some kid's piano recital of Chopin, and instead of letting us listen to the Chopin that is making Jack so emotional, Giacchino cuts out the piano and replaces it with some generic emotional strings. If you have powerful music written into the narrative of the film, why would you ever not take advantage of that, unless you are willfully undercutting it for some subversive reason? Come on.
And so we come full circle to the awful soundtrack that makes a marginally above-average film a great deal more grating.
2.5 / 5 BLOBS
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