I had the pleasure of watching for the third or fourth time the movie, The Professional, the other night. It stars Jean Reno as a hit man who takes a young girl (Natalie Portman - first role), whose family has been murdered by DEA agents, under his wing and tutelage. Gary Oldman plays the cruel and eccentric DEA agent bad guy.
Despite my pacifist proclivities, I enjoy many violent movies, and this one doesn’t disappoint. The relationship that develops between Leon (the hit man) and Mathilda (Portman) is also very moving, despite some of its predictability.
The movie takes place in New York City and there are some scenes with Danny Aiello (the character who gives Leon his assignments and holds his money for him) in a restaurant called the Supreme Macaroni Company. It’s on 39th and 9th Ave in Manhattan and the staff there have real (at least when I last visited) old New York accents. They pronounce “oil” as “earl” and “toilet” as “terlet” (as did my landlord when I was growning up). The food there is very fine, too.
Luc Besson, the director, also did the orginal movie La Femme Nikita. The was remade ala American style as Point of No Return with Brigette Fonda and became a USA Network television series; both inferior to the original.
It’s a great movie! Thankfully, it hasn’t fallen prey to the usual Hollywood disease of sequelitis.
I really like the ending, where the headmistress offers to give Mathilda a second chance if she’ll only stop lying, so Mathilda tells her the truth, and…
well it sorta already did.The Professional is the unadvertised prequel to the awesome movie Le Femme Nikita.
in The Professional she is a little girl but in Le Femme Nikita she becomes a full blown assasin.
you will also get a kick out of learning that Leon is really known as " The Cleaner" get Le Femme Nikita in the foreign film section with sub-titles,the dubbed version is heavily edited and the voice overs are lackluster.
Can’t be. The Reno character, the Cleaner, dies in Leon so can’t be alive for Nikita. The movies are connected thematically and in spirit but not in telling a continued story.
Yes, but, does he need to be alive for La Femme Nikita? It’s been a while since I saw it, but isn’t Nikita’s trainer a bit closer in age to her than Leon is to Mathilda?
Then again, though the last time I saw Léon was back in March, when I had only one day off (worked nearly solid overtime!), I remember that Mathilda was just a kid from NYC, and there was no indication that she spoke French…
Of course, she could have studied really hard at the girls’ orphanage, and then gone to France, and…
I bought this movie on your recommendation. I loved it. I just finished seeing it, which meant it was finally safe for me to read the rest of this thread.
My wife, who loved the original Luc Besson movie version and not the American remake so much, used to watch it religiously. I watched it with her sometimes, but didn’t like it as much as the movie.
I liked it because it wasn’t like every other show on t.v. I agree with you Raphael that it isn’t as good as the movies on the subject. Sendhair, I am a little slow, so the suspense was just great for me. There are a few episodes though where main characters get killed, and that string of episodes where they alter nikita’s brain to make her evil.
-chris
