Léon is a professional assassin, who one day, after a tragic incident, decides to take care of his 12 year old neighbour played by Natalie Portman, and for the rest of the film, we follow their journey and adventures together, while their relationship grows closer and closer...
I do commend the filmmakers for having the balls to showcase a taboo subject matter, but that alone is far from enough to win me over, it's the execution where it counts, and I'm not really confident with saying that the film was ably executed. Sure the movie is shot competently, the events are fairly entertaining, and the dynamic between Léon and Mathilda can get pretty interesting, but when you have the assassin/Mafia world as the background, and you fail to correctly put it together with the main story, things start to get messy.
My main issue with "
Léon" is that it completely does away with the idea of consequence, whenever it's time for an action scene, it pretty much turns into your standard superhero movie, where there's absolutely no tension or consequences to any action, it turns stale, dull, and more importantly predictable which is such a shame.
As for the acting, Natalie Portman did a good job and truly was a great child actor, which in reality, only equals to an alright actor. Jean Reno did good as well, but wasn't anything special either, and I guess that is another problem I had with the movie, the fact that there was absolutely nothing exceptional about it.
The music is another aggravating part about the movie, not only is the film already cheesy to begin with, but the soundtrack only makes it worse, by adding unnecessary music to get a cheap and unearned reaction out of the viewer, seriously the use of music sometimes felt so ridiculous and unfitting.
I really shouldn't be surprised, but I was also taken aback by the fact that this is
#27 on IMDb's '
top 250', which isn't anything substantial or concrete in my eyes anyway, but I guess I wasn't expecting it to be somewhat unanimously loved.
Even though I have been talking about "
Léon" as if it is the worst movie ever, it's clearly far from that, in fact I gave it a pretty good rating, it's just that I wasn't ready to
only sit through a good film, because good is exactly where it stops.
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Half an hour about Stingo could make me sick either.
