I finally made it all the way through Léon: The Professional. I got about an hour into this film a few years ago but either gave up or got too drunk to remember watching the rest of it.
Well made, filled with numerous obvious impossibilities and goofs, but as a romantic fantasy it’s good fun with A+ NYC filming locations.
I don’t like how the corrupt DEA dude (Gary Oldman) basically got away with it all in being granted an instant and virtually painless death. His early Beethoven comments did not quite work for me, either. I think he said something about overtures. Beethoven’s overtures are often used as concert or CD filler, and they are reputable works by any estimate. But it’s not like the first thing anyone says about Beethoven is that he wrote great overtures. Oldman’s Mozart stylings didn’t make much sense either, hitting an upper octave flourish that didn’t look like anything from Mozart, though it showed that Oldman might actually have some piano-playing ability.
While he was talking about Beethoven you’d think they could have actually piped in some music by Beethoven, right?
The plot twists and escapes in Léon exhaust the limits of credulity but what is almost impossible to believe in reality is that Natalie Portman was only 12 years old when this film was made. I wouldn’t say she completely stole the show from Jean Reno, who played Léon. Under more exploitative direction and with a weaker leading actor she very easily could have. The laughing scene, where she gets high on champagne after guzzling it like a college kid, was so real it was scary. The “Please open the door” sequence is for the ages. Her Russian Roulette gambit was enough to make my heart twist into a pretzel.
Combat sequences were the stuff of Schwarzenegger, with maybe a little more artistic panache. I also found comparison to The Score (2001), with Robert de Niro and Edward Norton. I watched The Score twice years ago. An important difference between Leon and The Score is that you just don’t know how Leon is going to end. The Score, as I remember it now, was kind of a done deal from the get go. Should watch some of that again.
I spotted a couple of payphones in Léon, with one phone in particular making 4 or 5 appearances. Payphone spotting in movies is fun. If it makes me watch more movies, which at this time of my illustrious life feels like something I need to catch up on, then that is a good thing. I’ve lined up a bunch of 1970s-1990s movies, assuming films from that era are more likely to have payphones show up either as props or as substantive conduits. If there are none then it’s all good, I watched a new-to-me movie.
I was thinking that Léon, being about assassins, might actually use payphones for anonymous communiqués to intended targets. Nothing doing. Just passing appearances as homely street furniture.
Lots of corny romantical motifs: Pig, plant, milk. “You’ve given me a taste of life” he says before shoving her pretty and resisting face down the narrow opening of the building, then screaming like he is about to turn into The Incredible Hulk.
Well alright then…
