Hacker Cinema
Léon: The Professional
Léon
1994 · Film · 111 min
Directed by Luc Besson
Léon, the top hit man in New York, has earned a rep as an effective "cleaner". But when his next-door neighbors are wiped out by a loose-cannon DEA agent, he becomes the unwilling custodian of 12-year-old Mathilda. Before long, Mathilda's thoughts turn to revenge, and she considers following in Léon's footsteps.
8 positive4 negative7 neutralfrom 19 commenters
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22 comments on Hacker News
I am forever indebted to Luc Besson for directing Léon: The Professional, the most sympathetic and realistic portrayal of DEA agents, headed by none other than Gary Oldman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on:_The_Professional
I mean, considering that drugs and the war on drugs was only tangential to the storyline of this film, Besson succeeded in catching all viewers in a morally conflicted web. Can anyone identify the "good side" or innocents in this story?
I remember reading the letters of Cicero about Gaias Julius (Later known as Cesar) how he complains how the he and his gang is acting all amoral and wearing ridiculous scandalous clothes, waring the togas in provocative feminine fashion.
There are accounts from all over history of how "the times were more thoughtful and moral in the good old days" But here we are, thousands of years later, still complaining about the younger members of our species and how they will bring ruin to us all. Perhaps they will, but it all seems so human to complain about that.
I remember the art of the 90s - when my part of the world got access to marvelous pieces like Thunder in Paradise, Barbed Wire, American Ninja, Bay Watch ... at the time it was considered the pinnacle of art by teenagers like me, and despised by my parents. But at the same time we had things like The Matrix, The Shawshank Redemption, Leon ... We remember the good stuff and the forget the fluff.
There are some real gems being created all the time, maybe not always from Hollywood but human creativity soldiers on.
The Good Place, The Expanse, 3 Body Problem, Horizon Zero Dawn, Expedition 33, Project Hail Marry. There is a constant stream of incredible thoughtful stuff being produced - books, games, movies, essays, videos, podcasts - the medium might change but humans always try to find ways to discover, understand and express the world around us in novel ways, one just needs to listen/watch.
Reminds me of the Luc Besson film "Leon", which also went by the names "The Professional" and also "Leon: The Professional". A great film but there was definitely something going on in regards to getting crowds interested purely by messing with the title of the film.
I wonder whether you could extrapolate off other industries.
IE things like sports or music where the top 1% make f*k-you money and the rest either get by or struggle. Do they have to do the occasional public performance to build hype?
Or maybe it's more like a tradie. I always thought Leon:The Professional was a story about an apprenticeship, not that movies are a source of truth on real life.
> That terrible Lost in Space movie
I'll never defend "Lost in Space" as a cinematic tour-de-force in the traditional sense but I'll be damned if it isn't one of the most quintessentially-90s films ever made. It has Silicon Graphics logos and bubble-shaped silver electronics everywhere. William Hurt managed to find time to slip away from the "Dark City" set to make an appearance. Pre-Felicity Shagwell/post-Rollergirl Heather Graham fends off advances from Joey Tribbiani while the crazy guy from "Leon: The Professional" makes a bunch of bizarre wisecracking non-sequiturs. A brash Big beat remix of the original TV theme blares over the credits immediately following a fight involving a giant CGI (SGI?) spider.
I disliked it intensely as a kid but enjoy it a lot in retrospect because of my high-resolution nostalgia goggles.
It's worth asking before anyone loses their mind about this, who made this change and why? Licensors like Criterion can't and don't "re-edit" (if you can call removing 4 seconds re-editing). Others can and do pretty frequently.
It's decisions about market fit by executives, not a moral crusade (as we have seen, Hollywood execs aren't really the type for that). Sometimes the whole film is affected, as in Blade Runner, Brazil, Once Upon a Time in America, or Kingdom of Heaven. Those movies were "butchered" (to use the language of the histrionic Forbes article). Yet in Leon (The Professional) the director supposedly intended the titular character to sleep with his underage protege. I'm glad someone overrode the sacred "artist's intent" there, and I wish someone had done the same for George Lucas's ill-advised Star Wars editions.
Here someone probably looks at a report and says, OK here are the movies in our pile with more than 20 slurs in them. Let's try to get that number below 10 so we don't have to add a "the language in this film represents the time in which it was made..." warning, that turns a lot of people off.
These decisions get made to maximize shareholder value, and the original film is not lost (except in the case of Star Wars), it's just one of a dozen variant cuts — you think they show the same exact movie everywhere in the world? Ever been to China? Believe it or not art is flexible and resilient. A film can survive a temporary blip while some VPs try to minimize complaints from sensitive viewers. If you disagree with those viewers that is another issue in my opinion.
> I would love to see it become a golden era of the niche matinee where smaller theaters can flourish that show older films, art films, foreign films etc.
You should love the reality we live in, then, because that's exactly what's been happening and it's in some sense part of the problem.
My spouse and I go to the theaters as often as we ever have, but it's very noticeable that the lion's share of the movies we now watch in theater are special showings of older movie classics or "cinema of country X" type festival events, which than often select from the last ten years or so. This has held for the past half-decade across two countries.
When we lived in Seoul, there was a few years when it was a popular couple date option to go to open air rooftop cinemas showing modern classics like "Her" or "Before Sunrise", or to go to the Silver Cinemas originally subsidized for seniors where you'd watch old Hollywood classics from the 40s to 60s (we managed to watch a 70mm projection of all the 4 hours of "Lawrence of Arabia" that way). Now in Berlin, there's a large selection of small cinemas showing random movies from all eras. Our favorite is situated in an old DVD store and specializes in a combo of movies and serving specialty whisky ... it's as hipster as it sounds. I think the last movies we went to see there were "First Blood" and "Persona" and "Leon", I guess.
And it's fun, but at the same time it's kind of sad your only two options are watching the latest Marvel flick or All Time Top 250 movies from the 1970s. That still means so much that movies used to be is gone. The second-tier smaller blockbusters you had in the 80s and 90s for example, non-franchise original IP, or the even the lesser known movies from decades past. If you're not on top of the food order, you're just gone.
I'm not too doom-y and gloom-y overall on the state of movies, there's still more interesting movies each year than I can keep up with if I aggregate all the possible venues. But the selection in cinemas is, well, very two-note.
Some backstory: Luc Besson directed "The Professional" (1994). His second wife was Maïwenn Le Besco, who was the model, but not the voice, for the Diva in "The Fifth Element" (1997), also directed by Besson. Maïwenn and Besson started dating when she was 15 and he was 31, they were married in 1992 when she was 16, and she had his child in January 1993. She later claimed that their relationship inspired "The Professional." They divorced in 1997 after Besson, 38, became involved with and then married "The Fifth Element" star Milla Jovovich, 21. Later in 2018 Besson was accused of rape by several women, though he denied the accusations and they were never proven in court.
I'm not sure whether the fact that the director of a movie with a pedophilic subtext was himself involved in an only-slightly-less pedophilic relationship in real life makes the movie itself less ethical to make or to watch, though it certainly doesn't make it any better. Maybe I'm saying that I'm skeptical that a creator who does some immoral thing can make a creation about that same thing with the context and discretion necessary not to glorify it.
I've heard it quipped that there's no such thing as anti-war movie. No matter how searing the criticism, no matter how horrifying the violence: war simply looks good on the screen, and the spikes of adrenaline we get during a war film excite us. The same could be said of films with any form of taboo sexuality, even when done in the spirit of satire or social criticism.
> I'm sure there are some snuff films with interesting character development too.
The criticism is absolutely worth considering, regarding the ethics of production. But it's worth contrasting like-with-like (not to shut down the argument, but to try to define the boundaries):
- Was the production of "The Professional" or "Taxi Driver" ethical? Both films sexualized young girls; and in the former case, Natalie Portman found the experience (particular the response and aftermath) moderately traumatic, and explicitly avoided roles with any sexuality until her late twenties.
- Was Kubrick's directorial process ethical, particularly in regard to The Shining, where he was blatantly abusive to Shelley Duvall (charitably, to elicit the best performance)? If that instance is over the line, exactly how hard are directors allowed to be on actors, and how much explicit prior consent should be necessary for "method directing"?
- To what extent is child labor in film-making ethical to begin with? We've converged on 14 as the minimum age for W-2 employment (notwithstanding family businesses, kids with apps, kids with YouTube channels, and "off-books" tasks for pocket money). If hiring a kid for a movie is fine, why can't that same kid sweep floors at a gas station? We could say "because there's no other way to make realistic movies"; but that's not that different from "there's no other way to tell a story about coming-of-age in a hyper-sexualized world".
- To what extent should such limitations be a product of individual ethical choices, vs social norms / taboos, vs "market ethics" (boycotts), vs public law and policy (either in the sense of labor laws, or indecency constraints on expression)?
Again, not saying that criticizing the production of Cuties isn't valid, or appealing to the status quo, and definitely not making some backdoor argument against child labor laws or age-of-consent; just that these questions are larger in scope, and don't have obvious answers.
In the dim reaches of the past, I did film reviews (even compensated) for a 'zine.
I quickly learned that, while it is certainly fun to savage a bad film, or to plunge off into some obscurity, my (hopefully) number one priority was to equip the readers of my review with what they need to decide whether or not they want to watch a movie. Just as a crude example, Joe Bob Briggs frequently reviews drive-in cinema, and at the start of a film review he will tally up breasts, decapitations, "fuzzy wangdoodles," and the odd types of martial arts you might see in a grindhouse flick (should someone be killed with a toaster, this is toaster-fu), and so these can serve as kind of metrics for drive-in movies. If your audience is a horror crowd, you might talk about practical f/x versus CGI, jump scares, black cats hurled into the screen, cheap tricks like loud scores, and "Did the movie scare me?"
Later, though, you can get into the "critical" business, as sort of a past the fold realm where spoilers rule. You might even -- and here those with fond memories of Dead Poet's Society might flinch -- what the director wanted to accomplish and just how close he or she came to doing that. You can nerd out as much as you like, but ... not until you have done the job of equipping your audience with a way to make decisions.
This naturally is the point where subjectivity rears its head.
You have two defenses against this. The first is your basic film summary, the TV guide version. One or two sentences describing the setup, drop the names of one or two relevant actors, year of production, a genre (likely split down the middle), and the dangerous assignment of stars.
The second defense is more subtle, and requires that your readers understand you as a reviewer, which is to say "wear your biases on your sleeve." As an example, read Ebert's review of Leon: The Professional, and then pause for a bit and ask yourself how Ebert might react to Chloe Moretz's character in Kiss-Ass before actually reading said review. If you knew ahead of time that he would find that concept pretty objectionable, well, then Ebert has done his job, he let you know what he cannot be objective about. Here, it is about developing that relationship of trust between the reviewer and the reader.
After this, you can talk about the progression of the careers of the director, how this screenplay probably lifted elements of something else, how a given actor is up and coming, and the suitability of the selected aspect ratios. You can get pretty deep in the weeds with that.
The job itself is as easy or as hard as you wish to make it. If your concern is only the "messaging" of the movie for whatever your political interests are, it is a breeze. Similarly, if you just want to trash a film -- and the joys of MST3King something which has wasted your time are not to be underestimated -- your effort comes largely in crafting whatever jokes you might make at the film's expense. If, however, you want your readers to feel like they can read at least the spoiler-free portion of your review and trust that you have given them enough information to decide whether or not they want to spend their time and money on that movie, well ... it is a bit harder.
Lost Girls is a good point (I haven't read it, but I know the rap on it, and I know the rap on Moore, and yeah I'd probably be pretty squicked out).
I didn't know that about Besson! You may have ruined Léon for me. You really need to believe there's no question where Besson stands on sexual relationships between generations to stomach that movie.
People are perhaps nervous about exactly where the line is between what Alan Moore writes about in for example "Lost Girls" and what Alan Moore might really believe about adolescent girls and sex.
Similar to how people were nervous about Luc Besson who made the film Léon about the relationship between an underage girl and a middle aged hitman, not so long after marrying his very pregnant 16 year old girlfriend. Besson has in more recent years been accused of rape by several young women.
Your examples of public domain movies take a rather flexible view of the source material.
Frozen is a long way from The Snow Queen. A queen had powers over ice there where trolls and someone was saved by a kiss, but in the Snow Queen it was a guy saved by the kiss and the trolls where evil etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone at Disney read it, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Peter Pan, Little Mermaid, etc adaptations at least share some basic elements of the story though their at most fanfics and really that’s all I am advocating.
Nobody is going to pay for the rights to the Hitman video game franchise and create The Professional. Because if you mutate the story that much you’re legally in the clear.
I did find the article’s point - that having a comically evil villain can sometimes work out really well as a narrative device - to be relevant. The example that the author points out - that some people are just plain evil and their malice is beyond comprehension - is exhibited really well by the Joker. A few other memorable examples that come to mind where such villainy plays off its absurdity to make a larger point are Gary Oldman in Leon the Professional and Tilda Swinton’s various villains in Joon-ho’s films.
But far too often the one dimensionality is used as a lazy writing device and serves as a showcase for an amateurish script.
"The Big Blue" is a timeless masterpiece and one of my favorite films of all time. The ethereal photography and soundtrack create an otherworldly vibe without veering too far into Lynchian surrealism. Luc Besson is probably better-known for his later action films ("The Professional", "The Fifth Element", etc) but "The Big Blue" is his magnum opus IMHO.
Leon the Professional was available in North America with the BluRay re-release if not before. If I hadn’t sold The Professional I could have shown it to the kids several years earlier. As it is the cringe factor they experienced means I may have still miscalculated.
That film cemented Gary Oldman as my favorite actor for that decade. It’s also just a really good action film. And I was bummed when Danny Aiello passed and hardly anyone mentioned Old Tony.
Old habits die hard. Watch the movie 'Leon, the Professional, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110413/ , and you will know who you are. Old habits die hard. Cold or no cold/hot coffee.
Reminds me of the TV series Lie To Me (03x13) called "Killer App" where the Zuckerberg character's social network uses cell phone camera technology to point one's phone at anyone's face in order to get their profile info.
Also reminded me a bit of the iris scanners in Leon, Mexico http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/26/iris-scanning-set-to-secure-city-in-mexico-then-the-world-video/
apologies, I thought it was so old a spoiler alert would not be required. Carelessness on my part for sure, it's just that to me it is like discussing the ending of 'star wars' or 'the french connection'.
Great movie though, The Professional, go see it anyway, in spite of the spoiler and enjoy the music too.
if I correctly remember that movie it didn't end too well for the professional ;)
Yea, silly works.
If we really want to give programmers silly names fine I am a "Professional". Aka the movie "the Professional" where you have a problem, you pay me money, I solve the problem. Rock Stars are just another silly name people give out so they don't have to pay you what your time is worth. Look up actual rock stars they tend to end up broke because while it might look like the are making a lot of money most of the time they are getting peanuts.
Yeah sorry about the lack of paragraphs. I always get this nagging feeling that I need to add empty rows for.. clarity :)
You watch Fight Club several times per week?! I can't understand the motivation, but hey, people are different!
I've seen Fight Club exactly once, in a theatre, but there are movies I've seen many times, and will watch again. One such movie is Leon ("The Professional"). In case you haven't seen it, do yourself a favour.. It has to be the director's cut though.
> Finally, I think at this stage piracy (well, quality piracy at least) is still something that Joe Public isn't savvy enough to pick up.
Maybe, but many Joe Publics are already downloading movies much like you and I, and at least see some of the good stuff in there while looking for Saw XVII.
They might download quality entertainment by accident. Of course, they might just as well stop watching it too, when quality fails to keep their attention.
Anyways, Transformers was legendary for me too, and the movie was enjoyable, with some of the coolest 3D ever. I feared Michael Bay would just totally ruin it.