No Women, No Kids, That's The Rules.

Eleven year old crazed female killers? It happened long before Kick-Ass, my friends.


Luc Besson apparently wrote the script for Léon (or The Professional) in thirty days after production was pushed back on The Fifth Element due to Bruce Willis' schedule. He didn't want to have to let the production crew go or lose his momentum, so he made another film while he waited. Of course. As you do. As much as I have fond memories of The Fifth Element from when I was a child, this film is definitely the better of the two. Sometimes the best moments in life occur while you're waiting for something to happen, or however that goes.

Léon (Jean Reno) is a contract killer, a 'cleaner.' He lives next door to a family, whose middle child Mathilda (Natalie Portman) manages to miss her family being killed by crooked cop Stansfield (Gary Oldman) as she has ducked out to the shops. She begs Léon to take her in and teach her to 'clean' so that she can exact revenge on the people who killed her little brother, which he is very resistant to - he works alone. She wins him over through pleading and her Lolita-esque beguiling charm - it's been a long time since I last saw the film, but the first thing that came into my head was of Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.


What follows is Léon training to Mathilda to 'clean.' They work out every day, he teaches her how to handle weapons and use them, and eventually she embarks on her expedition to exact vengeance on Stansfield and his crew. However, she underestimates precisely how brilliantly mad Stansfield is, resulting in a fantastically epic final fight.


Superficially the film could bear similarity to films such as The Karate Kid - old master takes on young apprentice, teaching all he knows before apprentice becomes brilliant. What sets it apart is the darkness and precociousness of Mathilda. Portman lays down the gauntlet to the rest of her career (which she has done a damn good job of successfully challenging) with a tremendous debut performance at eleven years of age, holding her own against the simple matter-of-factness of Reno's Léon and the highly crazed maniacism of Oldman (which made me think of his Dark Knight costar, Heath Ledger's Joker.)


A very good film, it didn't quite make it to great status for me. Just lacking something, that little bit of va-va-voom that sticks in your mind and refuses to leave. 4 stars.

I'm Alone, I Am Not Lonely.

I sometimes think I am quite easily flabbergasted. Well, maybe that's a little harsh. I guess in retrospect it's easy to state an opinion on what should have happened, but I do wonder what people were thinking at the time. I mean, looking back, do we really think Braveheart was the best film of 1995? Really? I'm not even talking just out of the nominated five films for the Academy Awards. 

Here we have Heat, a film that is very highly respected, was highly critically acclaimed, reasonably commercially successful, united two acting legends on screen in the same scene for the first time, with an excellent and exciting supporting cast. And it gets nothing? Really? Doesn't seem right, does it?


Heat is a crime saga set in LA, and it's quite a big film. There's a lot going on in it, and I'm not going to try and summarise it because, well, it's hard work and I'm so behind on my writeups that I need to get cracking on the rest of them. Briefly, Robert De Niro plays criminal Neil McCauley, pursued by Al Pacino's Lt. Vincent Hanna. Working with McCauley are fellow crims Chris (Val Kilmer), Nate (Jon Voight), Michael (Tom Sizemore) and Donald (Dennis Haysbert.) McCauley is getting mixed up with a girl, Eady (Amy Brenneman), complicating his no-attachment dogma, while Hanna's marriage to Justine (Diane Venora) is falling about because of his commitment to his work, leaving his stepdaughter Lauren (Natalie Portman) stranded and despairing.


Michael Mann directs his own screenplay, and does it with his usual brilliance. His Heat to Ali period was fantastic, yielding such solid films. His fearless and bold directing style allows you to seep into the mood of the characters and the situations, giving you time to breathe with them in the few occasions there are moments to spare, and sucking you into their world of glamour and dirt with beautiful photography (from Dante Spinotti) and a terrific use of music (score from Elliot Goldenthal.)


Heat is a luscious landscape, a true modern epic, taking inspiration from the methodical yet languid stylings of films such as The Godfather, imbuing them with modern moralities and a lack of judgement. There's respect flying everywhere in this picture. The performances are uniformly superb, expected from heavyweights De Niro and Pacino, but bolstered by the likes of Kilmer and Sizemore - why has Val Kilmer fallen off the face of the planet? We love him!


5 stars.