Leon is an odd film in a lot of ways; undoubtably French (and this is a Luc Besson film, so it makes sense), it's very nearly a comic book rendered as a motion picture - the story of a lonely hitman named Leon (Jean Reno) who takes an orphaned girl under his wing and trains her to be an assassin. It's true, then, that much of Leon is dramatic, but the heightened sense of reality, and one truly hammy - but deliciously giddy - performance from Gary Oldman as a corrupt DEA agent just pushes it into the boundaries of certified action movie. It would be wrong to say that the action scenes here overshadow the film's best performance, because they don't; Natalie Portman, just twelve at the time, offers up a remarkable portrait of a lost girl who falls in love with her surrogate father. Still, Besson is a skilled action director, and though the sequences here are larger than life, they retain a sense of blunt reality that makes them powerful and - in some cases - disturbing. The opening sequence of film, which exists as a means of establishing a day in the life of our protagonist, is slick and bloody, and the film's explosive final battle - ridiculously large and over the top - feels like it's been mined from the pages of a comic book.
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
