TheProfessional Tagged Articles at Cinematical

This week, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released Leon: The Professional on Blu-ray, and because I have the best job in the world, I got to watch it for this column. The truth is that this was a formative movie for me, not only augmenting my budding cinephilia in terms of attention to and interest in strongly visual filmmakers, but in understanding the technical and artistic value of widescreen cinema. Before the film was released on widescreen VHS and later, DVD, I watched the pan-and-scan version when it was first released on video and almost got sick from the cropping and scanning of director Luc Besson's balletic camerawork.

Thankfully, I never have to watch it via that sort of butchered presentation again, and even if you don't think the movie is a masterpiece, at the very least, SPHE's new Blu-ray offers a gorgeously rich transfer that fully celebrates Besson's cinematography. But even though this is a film I've revisited several times since its original release in 1994, I was curious to see how well The Professional would hold up some 15 years later – which brings us to this week's "Shelf Life."

For those of you who have been wanting to see what happens after Leon, aka The Professional, you'll have to keep waiting. While I wouldn't be surprised if one day Luc Besson rethinks things, as he sometimes does, for now he has no plans or interest in a sequel to the film, and Natalie Portman has now joined the team-o-disinterest. She recently spoke to MTV about the possibility, and says: "I would work with Luc Besson again, in a second, but [not on a sequel]." I can't blame her, as it's always risky business to try and match the quality of a well-loved and praised classic. But I'm betting the rationale is different for her follow-up -- that she won't be taking part in any more Star Wars either: "I spent ten years working on these films. It's time to let it continue on its own."

But that's not all the actress said. She also explained: "When something works, you don't touch it. You try to create something new that's positive." That makes sense and all, but for some reason, she only seems to apply that to sequels. As MTV brings up -- she's about to begin filming the remake Brothers, which she joined back in October. The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire as brothers -- the latter is the marine husband of Portman, who goes off to war just as his brother, Gyllenhaal, gets released from jail. So Jake's character takes care of his brother's family, and things get sticky.

Perhaps she makes an exception when a remake is based on a foreign film, and is different from the original. She says of the project: "I did [see Brodre], but I'm not going to study it. I think it's a very different movie." Are remakes only okay if they're a lot different than the source? I would think in that case, we're not actually talking about a remake, but about an "inspired by" film. But what about you? Are you equally apprehensive or against both, or do you find yourself favoring one over the other?

Dang, there sure are a lot of hitman characters in the movies. And what's the difference between a hitman and an assassin, anyway? Does Jason Bourne count, or is he no longer a hitman/assassin by the time his cinematic story begins? Are Pulp Fiction's Vincent and Jules really hitmen or are they technically bagmen? Yeah, it's a difficult task to make a list of prominent hitmen in film. So, I'll let someone else make a "25 Greatest Hitmen" list; here, I present my seven favorites.

Feel free to mention your own preferences. With so many characters, whether easily falling within definition or not, I'm certainly leaving out a lot of good ones. But, as I said, these are my favorites. The cool, the funny, the interesting, they're the ones I enjoy watching over and over again, despite their lethal nature.


Martin Q. Blank in Grosse Pointe Blank (1997, George Armitage)

There is no better hitman than John Cusack's Martin Blank. He's good at his job, and he's funny, and he's willing to give it all up for love. Of course, he's bored enough by the occupation that he'd probably give it up for any good reason. It doesn't seem to matter to him that it's morally wrong; he's just another normal guy, dissatisfied with his job. And while it does seem to be a gag that's stretched thin, his issues do make him more entertaining than the usual silent-yet-conflicted hitmen. Plus, it's enjoyable to think that this is what really happened to Lloyd Dobbler, or Lane Meyer, or any other Cusack character from the '80s.

Signature line: "I was hired to kill you, but I'm not going to do it. It's either because I'm in love with your daughter or because I have a new found respect for life."

There aren't too many movies that necessitate sequels. Unless a movie is part of a pre-proposed series or is an adaptation of a series of books, it should probably be able to stand alone. But a lot of sequels come from movies that are perfect by themselves -- sometimes the sequels compliment nicely; sometimes they are easily ignored; occasionally they actually take away from the previously regarded original.

It isn't often that a movie screams out for a sequel, but I think I've come up with seven that at least whisper a request for one. Two actually have source sequels that they would be adapted from. One has a lot of history to mine material from. Three of them have been discussed at length at different points in time by makers of the original(s). The problem is that none of these sequels is likely to ever grace your DVD player let alone your local theater. For whatever reason, they simply have too much against them in the minds of studio execs. For now, though, we can dream.

1. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Even with the incredible cast and the surprisingly faithful-enough script, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was not the epic that I was hoping for. It also wasn't the blockbuster that Disney was hoping for. The filmmakers, Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith (aka Hammer and Tongs) and the necessary actors had signed on for the sequel, to be adapted from Adam's follow-up, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, but it appears to be dead in the water. Despite my few reservations with the first film, I would love to see the sequel, as well as the rest of the series (they could end before The Salmon of Doubt, I guess). I remember being bored with some of the prehistoric Earth sequences in Restaurant, but I think they'd make for great cinema. In any event, I think Martin Freeman and Mos Def were a great duo in the original, and they alone should have been propelled to stardom following its release. Maybe they can appear in something else together.

At the end of Léon (a.k.a. The Professional), Natalie Portman's character, Mathilda, goes back to school and presumably returns to a normal, civilized childhood. But who knows? A lot of us have imagined that she continues learning the ways of the assassin. I always think her character is like a precursor to the main character in Luc Besson's earlier film Nikita (aka La Femme Nikita). Of course, we will never know what really becomes of Mathilda, because Besson has no intention of making a sequel to Léon. But the last time he addressed the issue, he mentioned that people keep sending him script ideas for a follow-up. One of these ideas may have just been picked up by Focus Features.

According to Variety, Focus has a new film in development that the trade calls "a reverse spin on The Professional." Whether or not this was the studio's description, the film, called Hanna, appears to have a story that would easily work as a continuation of Besson's movie. It centers on a 14-year-old girl (two years older than Portman's character) who has been raised to be a killer (only here it is by her father, not the kindly neighborhood hit-man) and who now has to begin acting like a girl (just as Mathilda must do once back at school). The plot probably consists of the girl -- let's assume her name is Hanna -- getting into some sort of trouble that warrants her need to keep killing -- I'm thinking Grosse Pointe Blank but much, much younger (homecoming dance substituted for reunion, etc.) I'm sure that I'm wrong about the script, which was written by Seth Lochhead, originating as a sequel to Léon, but Besson might want to just take a look at his supposed stack of submissions and make sure.

I don't know what to make of Luc Besson. I first became aware of the director in college after seeing his action-classic La Femme Nikita. In fact, that film was one of the first ones I purchased on DVD when I got a DVD player. Then, he went on to direct the nearly-as-impressive The Professional and The Fifth Element -- featuring the exquisite Milla Jovovich as the perfect woman (inspired casting, IMHO). I liked those films but I didn't love them as much as I loved La Femme Nikita. And please, don't even get me started on The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. Man, what happened there?

Anyway, Besson continued to direct a few more films after The Messenger -- including Angel-A and the upcoming children's live-action/cgi film Arthur and the Minimoys (which our own Monika wrote about previously). However, for some reason -- declining popularity, critical drubbing, boredom, being French -- Besson announced that he was retiring from directing now that he's basically finished with his latest film. Cut to today because it seems he may have had second thoughts and that the rumors of his retirement may have been "exaggerated."

According to Production Weekly, Besson would consider a return to directing if his film Arthur and the Minimoys does well. Provided that the film is a success, Besson would begin adapting the second book of the series Arthur and the Forbidden City for the screen with an anticipated start of shooting as early as June of next year. I don't know, this sort of smells of desperation, doesn't it? Sure, its up to him if he wants to retire. But either do it or don't do it. And either way, don't hang it on the audience and try to make them feel guilty or something if you stay retired because your film doesn't do well. If you do that, you just end up sounding like a whiner who can't make up his mind. And really, nobody likes a whiner.