Léon: The Professional Review

This is a review of the 133-minute international version, the cut Besson says he wanted to release before preview audiences in Los Angeles turned against the extra scenes. The restored material is almost all Léon and Mathilda, including her going out on jobs with him as a full accomplice, and it makes the film both richer and more uncomfortable. Jean Reno plays the killer as an overgrown child who drinks milk, tends a houseplant and sits alone in a cinema watching Gene Kelly, an American cousin, Besson said, of the cleaner Reno played in Nikita.

Natalie Portman, in her first film, is astonishing, precocious and wounded at once, and Gary Oldman's pill-popping Stansfield is the decade's most enjoyable overacting; Hal Hinson called him the least inhibited actor of his generation. Thierry Arbogast shoots the apartment corridors and the final siege with real verve. The trouble is the one Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel raised at the time: the film sexualizes a twelve-year-old and plays her crush on a grown man for tenderness, and the longer cut leans further in. Portman has since spoken of her complicated feelings about it. The craft is first rate; the judgment is not.