Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional puts a hitman and a twelve-year-old girl in the same apartment and asks the audience to live there for 111 minutes. The film, written and directed by Besson, stars Jean Reno as Léon Montana, a New York “cleaner” who takes in Mathilda Lando after her family is murdered. Natalie Portman plays Mathilda in her feature film debut. Gary Oldman plays Norman Stansfield, the corrupt DEA agent who pulls the trigger.
That is a strong premise. It is also a premise the film never fully earns. Léon: The Professional is a crime drama with an action spine, and its best scenes are quiet ones. Its worst scenes mistake noise for depth. The film scores 6.4/10.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
A Cleaner in Little Italy
Léon works for a mafioso named Old Tony, played by Danny Aiello, in the Little Italy neighborhood of New York City. He calls himself a cleaner, not a hitman. The distinction matters to him. He lives alone, keeps his apartment plain, and does his work without noise.
Reno plays this restraint well. Léon is not a talker. He is a man who has narrowed his life to a routine and a set of skills. The film’s tagline — “If you want the job done right, hire a professional” — is the whole character in one line.
Mathilda lives down the hall with a dysfunctional family. Her father, played by Michael Badalucco, is abusive. He stashes cocaine for corrupt DEA agents and then steals from the stash. That theft is what gets the family killed. Mathilda is out shopping for groceries when the agents invade the apartment.
She returns, sees what has happened, and keeps walking down the hall to Léon’s door. He lets her in. He does not want to. That hesitation is the most honest thing in the movie.
Stansfield and the Missing Drugs
Oldman’s Stansfield is the film’s engine and its biggest problem. He is a drug-addicted DEA boss who murders Mathilda’s family while searching for the missing cocaine. He is written as a loose cannon, and Oldman plays him as a man running on something other than reason.
The performance is loud. It is meant to be. Stansfield is a villain who does not need a motive beyond appetite, and the film gives him almost nothing else. He kills a four-year-old boy. The film states this plainly and then asks the audience to keep watching a story about a girl who wants revenge for that brother.
Oldman is a strong actor, and the role has become one of his best-known. But the character is thin. He is a threat, not a person. When a film builds its entire middle act around a villain this flat, the tension has to come from somewhere else. Here it comes from the relationship between Léon and Mathilda.
That relationship is the reason people still talk about this movie. It is also the reason the movie is hard to recommend without a warning.
Mathilda Learns the Trade
Mathilda discovers that Léon is a hitman. She begs him to take care of her and to teach her his skills. She wants to avenge her brother. Léon is unsettled by her presence. He considers killing her in her sleep. He does not.
Instead he trains her. He shows her how to use various weapons. In exchange, she runs his errands, cleans his apartment, and teaches him how to read. That last detail is the film’s best idea. A killer who cannot read, taught by a child who has stopped attending class at her school for troubled girls.
Mathilda develops a crush on Léon. She tells him she loves him, often. He does not reciprocate. The film is aware of how uncomfortable this is, and it uses that discomfort. Whether it uses it well is the question that has followed Léon: The Professional since its release.
Portman is the reason the film works at all. She was twelve when she played the role, and she holds the screen against Reno and Oldman without flinching. Mathilda is not a victim in her own story. She is a girl who has decided what she wants.
The Delivery Girl Bluff
When Léon is out on a job, Mathilda fills a bag with guns from his collection and sets out to kill Stansfield. She bluffs her way into the DEA office by posing as a delivery girl. Stansfield ambushes her in a bathroom.
One of his men arrives and tells him that Léon killed Malky, one of the corrupt DEA agents, in Chinatown. Peter Appel plays Malky. The detail lands as a complication, not a resolution. Mathilda is trapped, and the film has to find a way out.
This is where the action side of Léon: The Professional takes over. The film is billed as crime, drama and action, and the back half delivers on the third word. The set pieces are clean and well-staged. Besson knows how to move a camera through a hallway and make it mean something.
But the action is not what makes the film memorable. The apartment scenes are. The training. The reading lessons. The errands. Those are the moments that have kept Léon: The Professional in circulation.
What the Film Gets Right
Here is a ranking of what actually works in Léon: The Professional, from strongest to weakest.
- Natalie Portman as Mathilda. The film’s foundation. Without her, the premise collapses.
- Jean Reno as Léon. A quiet, specific performance that never asks for sympathy.
- The apartment relationship. The training, the errands, the reading lessons. The film’s real subject.
- The action staging. Competent and clear, but not the point.
- Gary Oldman as Stansfield. Memorable, but written as a symptom rather than a character.
- The revenge plot. The weakest thread, because it depends on the weakest character.
That order says something about the film. The parts that work are the parts that slow down. The parts that fail are the parts that speed up.
Two Relationships, One Apartment
The film’s central tension is between two things Léon and Mathilda are to each other. The source material is clear about both. She is his protégée, and she has a crush he does not return.
| Element | Léon | Mathilda |
|---|---|---|
| Role | Professional hitman, “cleaner” | Twelve-year-old girl, orphaned |
| Family | None shown | Dysfunctional, murdered |
| Skill | Weapons, work, silence | Reading, nerve, planning |
| Taught by the other | How to read | How to use weapons |
| Want | To be left alone | Revenge for her brother |
| Feeling for the other | Unsettled by her presence | A crush she states aloud |
The table is not a joke. It is the actual structure of the movie. Each character gives the other something they lack, and neither gets what they want.
That is a real idea. It is also an idea the film keeps circling without landing. Léon considers killing Mathilda in her sleep. Then he trains her. The turn happens, but the film does not do much work to earn it. It needs the plot to move, so the plot moves.
The Problem With Stansfield
The film’s biggest failure is that its villain is not worth the story built around him. Stansfield is a drug-addicted DEA boss who murders a family over stolen cocaine. He is a loose cannon. That is the whole of him.
A revenge plot needs a target the audience can hate with specificity. Stansfield is hateful, but he is not specific. He is a man with a badge and a habit. The film never explains why he is this way.
Oldman fills the space with volume. It works as a performance. It does not work as a character. When Mathilda sets out to kill him, the audience is not watching her confront a person. They are watching her confront a plot device.
Compare that to Léon. Reno gets almost no dialogue and builds a whole man. The film trusts the audience to read him. It does not extend that trust to Stansfield.
What Léon: The Professional Is Worth
Léon: The Professional was released in France by Gaumont Buena Vista International on 14 September 1994. It received mostly positive reviews from critics. In the United States it was first released as The Professional, and later as Léon: The Professional. The published critical score is 6.4/10.
That score is about right. The film is better than its reputation as a pure action movie and worse than its reputation as a classic. It has one great performance from a child actor, one great quiet performance from a French star, and one loud performance that has been mistaken for depth.
The relationship at the center is genuinely unusual. A hitman and a girl, sharing an apartment, teaching each other what the other does not know. That is the movie. Everything else — the DEA plot, the cocaine, the revenge — is scaffolding around it.
The scaffolding is not bad. The film runs 111 minutes. The action is clear. The tone holds.
The film’s discomfort with its own premise is visible. It wants the audience to feel the wrongness of Léon and Mathilda’s arrangement, and it also wants the audience to enjoy it. Those two wants pull against each other.
That is not a fatal flaw. It is the flaw that makes the film interesting. Léon: The Professional is not a movie about a hitman. It is a movie about a man who cannot read and a girl who has decided to stop being a child.
The score is 6.4 of 10.
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