The Power of The Professional: 30 Years Later
Columbia Pictures (1994)
Even though Leon: The Professional turns 30 this year, it still blows audiences away.
I probably saw Leon: The Professional, or as it’s become known as just The Professional, a couple of years after its theatrical release. In those days, it took movies a year or so to get picked up by HBO or Showtime when it left the theater. Ah, the days before streaming. My brother is the one who showed me this movie. I’m sure he had already seen it with his friends, but he told me it was good, and so I watched it. He wasn’t wrong, it was excellent!
It was the first real gritty movie that I can remember watching. Up until that point, I hadn’t really been exposed to movies about hitmen and the like; I was mostly watching teeny bopper shit and romcoms. It was surprising to me that I liked it so much, and it opened a whole new category of films for me to enjoy.
Jean Reno plays hitman Leon. His character is quite dynamic because he starts out as detached and unemotional, living a solitary life in a run down apartment, which he is fine with. He doesn’t have any friends or family, only his boss who gives him his jobs. It’s totally circumstantial that he meets his young neighbor, Mathilda, and ends up taking her in for a brief time before he gets killed.
His transition from being totally alone and very serious, to a man that views Mathilda like a daughter, a man that plays silly games with this young girl, who wants to plant roots, is emotional. Leon, sadly, makes this realization too late, but the fact that his character was even able to get to that conclusion before his death is beautiful and sad, and Reno’s depiction was superb.
Is there a better man to play a heinous villain other than Gary Oldman? The dude is seriously made for these vile characters. His acting as Norman Stansfield, a seriously fucked up DEA agent/drug dealer, is phenominal. The character gives off good cop, diabolical cop vibes, and Oldman plays it to a tee. Every time I see him in this role, I’m blown away by the immense power of his acting: the range, the rage, the psychoticness.
I really don’t think that the actors around Oldman had to do much work pretending to be scared of him because he is frightening as Stansfield. The character is slickly menacing, scarily calm, yet has a turbulent undercurrent ready to explode just below the surface, which he does in a couple of poignant scenes. Oldman delivered all of that and created one of the more memorable villains from the 90s.
The Professional also introduced the world to little Natalie Portman, who was only 13 when she played Mathilda. As an adult actress, Portman has won a number of awards for her performances. As a child, it was clear that she would become one of the best actresses of her generation.
The character of Mathilda is complicated; she’s a lost soul looking for stability but going about it the wrong way. Portman’s ability to show the different sides of Mathilda, without seemingly any effort, is crazy to think about when considering her age at the time. This was Portman’s first chance to show the world her skills, and she killed it!
Someone who has never seen The Professional could sit down today and be impressed with this film and that’s because of the remarkable acting from the three main characters. Reno, Oldman, and Portman carried this film when it was released, and their stellar performances haven’t aged one bit. This movie still remains as one of the ultimate best in modern times.