Blind Spot Fixed: Léon, The Professional

Life has taught me that it's always easier to just give your thumbs up to something than to back off and share your doubts on it. Add to that the fact that I can't really get angry - like, ANGRY angry - and think fighting is sort of useless, and you have me slightly afraid of the reactions to this post. Let's cut to the slack: I wasn't the biggest fan of Léon, my April entry to the Blind Spot series. It's a movie I've been aware of for a long time now and I've been close to picking it up several times on flea markets and the like. As all of the movies I chose for this blogathon, it's one of the highest ranked films on IMDBs Top 250 that I haven't seen until now - and this is a list I have only had good experiences with so far. Not that Léon was a bad experience. In fact, I acknowledge it to be a good, solid film with an unusual story and great characters. Still, I'm not a fan.

Léon *surprise surprise* is the name of the male lead of this film, played by the wonderful Jean Reno. With his trademark John Lennon sunglasses and fisherman's hat, he's a professional assassin who has built himself a nice quiet life full of routine. He has a moral code of not killing men and children, which distinguishes him from other people in this film. One day, he meets Mathilda, a very young Natalie Portman who's more of a black swan than anything in this film. Her family was killed by drug dealers (or something like that, whatever, Gary Oldman is terrifying) that are now after her, so Léon takes care of her and teaches her how to "clean" (I will never be able to tidy up the house again without thinking of murder).

The film is a typical Cult-Classic-Favorite-Critics-Darling that should've won me over right away. Jean Reno creates a recognizable character that will go down in film history, and so does Natalie Portman with a performance that let's other child actors look like extras. Seemingly effortlessly, she surprises - even shocks - the audience with her depiction of a highly damaged, premature child and never let's Reno or Oldman overshadow her in any way. Léon is best when it just focuses on the two main characters talking and interacting with each other. Especially the re-enactment of other movies is fun to watch. Even the humorous montages of assassinations and triangle scenes like Mathilda and Léon checking into the hotel are fun - it has to be somewhere in between all this greatness that the film looses me.

Perhaps it's the score; that melodramatic, stringy, synthesized 90s score that already made me freak out during Betty Blue. It's not that this movie seems flawed to me or bad for that matter - it just depresses the hell out of me. In a bad way. Not in a beautiful the-Black-Swan-has-to-die or in-that-moment-we-were-infinite kind of way, but in a characters-taking-hard-drugs kind of way. It repels me. I don't feel like watching it while I'm watching it and I don't feel like watching anything else after watching it. That's not the kind of feeling movies I like evoke in me. So while Léon: The Professional is definitely a good, original movie I would recommend, it's not a movie I like.

LÉON: THE PROFESSIONAL 1994 • France • English/ Italian
director and author Luc Besson pictures Thierry Arbogast ★ Jean Reno, Natalie Portman, Gary Oldman

FINAL FRAME: HYBRID „Special delivery huh... Let me guess... Chinese? Thai, maybe?“

NEXT UP: REAR WINDOW (1954)