A lonely hitman, a twelve-year-old apprentice, and a houseplant that finally gets roots
Luc Besson's 1994 thriller put Natalie Portman on screen for the first time, playing a girl who talks her way into a killer's apartment after corrupt drug agents wipe out her family. She teaches him to read; he teaches her to shoot. It sold over 3.6 million tickets in France alone.
Léon, known in American and Australian cinemas as The Professional, is a French production shot in English. Jean Reno plays the title character, an Italian-American contract killer who calls himself a cleaner and takes jobs from a Little Italy mobster called Old Tony. Gary Oldman plays Norman Stansfield, a drug-addicted Drug Enforcement Administration boss who murders Mathilda Lando's family, including her four-year-old brother, over stolen cocaine.
The bargain between the two leads drives the story. Mathilda runs errands, cleans and gives Léon reading lessons; in return he trains her with weapons so she can avenge her brother. She develops a crush he never returns. His own past explains his solitude: at nineteen in Italy he lost the girl he meant to elope with when her father killed her, and he fled to New York after taking revenge. The ending sees Léon die taking Stansfield with him, while Mathilda returns to school and plants his beloved houseplant in the ground.
Besson built the film partly out of his 1990 hit La Femme Nikita, where Reno had played a similar figure named Victor; the director joked that Léon might be Victor's more human American cousin. The French crime classic Le Samouraï was another influence, and Robert Mark Kamen reworked the script without credit. Most interiors were filmed in France, with New York streets on location and the closing school scene at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Gaumont Buena Vista International opened it in France on 14 September 1994, where it held the top spot for three weeks. Worldwide takings reached $45.3 million. Critics were largely warm: Empire gave it five stars, and Rotten Tomatoes lists 76 percent approval from 66 reviews, though Metacritic's average sits at 64. The soundtrack went gold in Japan in December 1999 after shipping 100,000 copies.
Source: Léon: The Professional
