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Lon: The Professional

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Wikipedia article




{{Infobox film

| name = Lon: The Professional

| image = Leon-poster.jpg

| caption = French theatrical release poster

| alt = Picture of Reno as Leon: He is bearded and wearing sunglasses looking upwards.

| native_name =

| director = Luc Besson

| writer = Luc Besson

| producer = Patrice Ledoux

| starring =

| music = ric Serra

| cinematography = Thierry Arbogast

| editing = Sylvie Landra

| studio = Les Films du Dauphin

| distributor = Gaumont Buena Vista International

| released =

| runtime = 110 minutes

| country = France

| language = English

| budget = $16 million

| gross = $46.1 million

}}

'Lon: The Professional' , titled 'Leon' in the UK (and originally titled 'The Professional' in the US), is a 1994 English-language French action-thriller film written and directed by Luc Besson. It stars Jean Reno and Gary Oldman, and features the film debut of Natalie Portman. The plot follows Lon (Reno), a professional hitman, who reluctantly takes in twelve-year-old Mathilda (Portman) after her family is murdered by corrupt Drug Enforcement Administration agent Norman Stansfield (Oldman). Lon and Mathilda form an unusual relationship, as she becomes his protge and learns the hitman's trade.

Plot



Lon is an Italian hitman (or "cleaner", as he refers to himself) in New York City's Little Italy working for a mafioso named "Old Tony". One day, Lon meets Mathilda Lando, a lonely 12-year-old girl. Mathilda lives with her dysfunctional family in an apartment down the hall from Leon, and has stopped attending class at her school for troubled girls. Mathilda's abusive father attracts the ire of corrupt DEA agents, who have been paying him to stash cocaine in his apartment. After they discover he has been stealing the cocaine, DEA agents storm the building, led by their boss, the sharply dressed drug addict Norman Stansfield. During the raid, Stansfield murders Mathilda's family while she is out shopping for groceries. When Mathilda returns, she realizes what has happened just in time to continue down the hall to Lon's apartment; he hesitantly gives her shelter.

Mathilda quickly discovers that Lon is a hitman. She begs him to take care of her and to teach her his skills, as she wants to avenge the murder of her four-year-old brother. At first, Lon is unsettled by her presence and considers murdering her in her sleep but he eventually trains Mathilda and shows her how to use various weapons. In exchange, she runs his errands, cleans his apartment and teaches him how to read. Mathilda looks up to Lon and quickly develops a crush on him, often telling him she loves him but he does not reciprocate.

When Lon is out on a job, Mathilda fills a bag with guns from Lon's collection and sets out to kill Stansfield. She bluffs her way into the DEA office by posing as a delivery girl, and is ambushed by Stansfield in a bathroom. One of his men arrives and informs him that Lon killed Malky, one of the corrupt DEA agents, in Chinatown that morning. Lon, after discovering her plan in a note left for him, rescues Mathilda, killing two more of Stansfield's men in the process. An enraged Stansfield confronts Tony, who is tortured for Lon's whereabouts.

Lon tells Mathilda about how he became a hitman. When Lon was 18 in Italy, he fell in love with a girl from a wealthy family, but Lon was from a poor family. The two made plans to elope but when the girl's father discovered their plans, he killed her out of anger. Lon killed the father in revenge and fled to New York, where he met Tony and trained to become a hitman.

Later, while Mathilda returns home from grocery shopping, an NYPD ESU team sent by Stansfield captures her and infiltrates Lon's apartment. Lon ambushes the ESU team and rescues Mathilda. Lon creates a quick escape for Mathilda by smashing a hole in an air shaft. He tells her that he loves her and to meet him at Tony's place in an hour, moments before the ESU team blow up the apartment. In the chaos, a wounded Lon sneaks out of the building disguised as a wounded ESU officer. He goes unnoticed by everyone except Stansfield, who follows him and shoots him in the back. As Lon dies, he presses a grenade pin in Stansfield's palm, saying that it is from Mathilda. Stansfield opens Lon's vest to find a cluster of grenades, which detonate, killing Stansfield.

Mathilda goes to Tony and tries to convince Tony to hire her but Tony flatly refuses to hire a twelve-year-old and tells Mathilda that Lon told him to give his money to her if anything happened to him. He gives Mathilda $100 as an allowance and sends her back to school, where the headmistress re-admits her after Mathilda reveals what has happened. Mathilda walks onto a field near the school to plant Lon's houseplant, as she had told Lon, to "give it roots".

Cast



Production



'Lon: The Professional' is to some extent an expansion of an idea in Besson's earlier 1990 film, 'La Femme Nikita' (in some countries 'Nikita'). In 'La Femme Nikita', Jean Reno plays a similar character named Victor. Besson described Lon as "Now maybe Jean is playing the American cousin of Victor. This time he's more human."Luc Besson. 'Lon: The Professional' Uncut International Version DVD", inside sleeve. Mawenn, Besson's wife at the time of filming, says the film was inspired their relationship; Besson met Mawenn when she was an 12, and they started dating when she was 15.[http://www.sbs.com.au/films/movie/7402/Leon:-The-Professional- Leon: The Professional]. sbs.com.au

While most of the interior footage was shot in France, the rest of the film was shot on location in New York City. The final scene at school was filmed at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Soundtrack



A soundtrack for the film was released in October 1994 by TriStar Music. It was commercially successful in Japan, being certified gold for 100,000 copies shipped in December 1999.

Release



'Lon: The Professional' was released in France on 14 September 1994. The film was a commercial success, grossing over $45 million worldwide on a $16 million budget. It grossed 26.8 million French Franc ($5.1 million) in its opening week in France and was number one for three weeks. In France, it sold 3,330,703 tickets in total.

Reception



Critical response

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 73% based on 64 reviews, with an average rating of 6.9/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "Pivoting on the unusual relationship between seasoned hitman and his 12-year-old apprenticea breakout turn by young Natalie PortmanLuc Besson's 'Lon' is a stylish and oddly affecting thriller.". Flixster. Retrieved 29 October 2020 At Metacritic, the film received an average score of 64 out of 100 based on 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".. Retrieved 21 August 2014 Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.

Mark Salisbury of 'Empire' magazine awarded the film a full five stars. He said, "Oozing style, wit and confidence from every sprocket, and offering a dizzyingly, fresh perspective on the Big Apple that only Besson could bring, this is, in a word, wonderful". Mark Deming at AllMovie awarded the film four stars out of five, describing it as "As visually stylish as it is graphically violent", and featuring "a strong performance from Jean Reno, a striking debut by Natalie Portman, and a love-it-or-hate-it, over-the-top turn by Gary Oldman". Richard Schickel of 'Time' magazine lauded the film, writing, "this is a Cuisinart of a movie, mixing familiar yet disparate ingredients, making something odd, possibly distasteful, undeniably arresting out of them". He praised Oldman's performance as "divinely psychotic".

Roger Ebert awarded the film two-and-a-half stars out of four, writing: "It is a well-directed film, because Besson has a natural gift for plunging into drama with a charged-up visual style. And it is well acted." However, he was not entirely complimentary: "Always at the back of my mind was the troubled thought that there was something wrong about placing a 12-year-old character in the middle of this action. ... In what is essentially an exercisea slick urban thrillerit seems to exploit the youth of the girl without really dealing with it."'The New York Times' Janet Maslin wrote, "'The Professional' is much too sentimental to sound shockingly amoral in the least. Even in a finale of extravagant violence, it manages to be maudlin ... Mr. Oldman expresses most of the film's sadism as well as many of its misguidedly poetic sentiments."

Year-end lists

* Honorable mention  Betsy Pickle, 'Knoxville News-Sentinel'

Legacy



In the 2013 book, 'Poseur: A Memoir of Downtown New York City in the '90s', Marc Spitz wrote that the film is "considered a cult classic". In 2014, 'Time Out' polled several film critics, directors, actors and stunt actors to list their top action films; 'Lon: The Professional' was listed at No. 42. The character Norman Stansfield has since been named as one of cinema's greatest villains.

The English band Alt-J released a song about the film, titled "Matilda" [sic]. The first line in the lyrics, "this is from Matilda", refer to Lon's last words to Stansfield, shortly before the grenades detonate and kills them.

South Korean comedian Park Myeong-su and singer-songwriter IU released and performed a song inspired by the film, "Leon", for a bi-annual music festival of South Korea's highly popular variety show, 'Infinite Challenge', in 2015.

Sequel



Besson wrote a script for a sequel, 'Mathilda', but filming was delayed until Portman was older. In the script, Mathilda was described as "older" and "more mature", and was working as a cleaner. However, in the meantime, Besson left Gaumont Film Company to start his own movie studio, EuropaCorp. Unhappy at Besson's departure, Gaumont Film Company "has held 'The Professional' rights close to the vest and will not budge".

In 2011, director Olivier Megaton told reporters that he and Besson used the script for 'Mathilda' as the basis for 'Colombiana', a film about a young cleaner played by Zoe Saldaa. Like Mathilda, her character goes to war with a drug cartel as revenge for the murder of her family when she was a child.

Extended version



There is also an extended version of the film, referred to as "international version", "'version longue'", or "'version intgrale'". Containing 25 minutes of additional footage, it is sometimes called the "Director's Cut" but Besson refers to the original version as the Director's Cut and the new version as "The Long Version". According to Besson, this is the version he wanted to release, but for the fact that the extra scenes tested poorly with Los Angeles preview audiences. The additional material is found in the film's second act, and it depicts more of the interactions and relationship between Lon and Mathilda, as well as explicitly demonstrating how Mathilda accompanies Lon on several of his hits as "a full co-conspirator", to further her training as a contracted killer.

References




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