Ronin

Masterless Masterclass

Ronin
USA/UK 1998 
Directed by John Frankenheimer 
United Artists Blu Ray Zone B

I haven’t revisited Ronin for years and so it was time for a Blu Ray upgrade of one of my all time favourite Frankenheimer films. John Frankenheimer will always be best remembered for some of the classic Hollywood films such as Seconds, Grand Prix and French Connection II but this one, made just four years before he died, is the one which I think is his most clever and compelling watch. 

The title of the film is a metaphor for a bunch of ex-secret service/military individuals who are brought together by Natascha McElhone’s Diedre... who you assume is working for the IRA, to steal (with deadly force) a case containing something which you never find out. Yeah, that’s right, the case is a classic Hitchcockian McGuffin and is unimportant in itself, other than it completely drives the action of the movie relentlessly forward. So, the team she puts in place is almost iconic... we have Robert DeNiro, Jean Reno, Sean Bean, Stellan Skarsgård and Skipp Sudduth. And they, almost, could all be the Ronin of the title... a term which, in ancient Japan, meant a masterless samurai who would often pick up jobs from various sources... apart from one character but, to reveal who that character is would be a spoiler. You don’t find out until the end anyway. 

And there is action, betrayal, unexpected deaths and one of, to my mind, the best car chases in cinema history (the second one of the two in this film). It moves along at a fair lick with the first half an hour setting up the characters and revealing all you need to know about them, as they plan their method of attack and then, of course, we have ‘the heist gone wrong’ trope which leads to all the shenanigans of the rest of the movie. That’s all I’m saying about the plot. 

The film is up there with The Quiller Memorandum almost (reviewed here), in terms of how clever the various characters are written and, I reckon a lot of that must be due to the uncredited script doctoring by David Mamet. So highlights in that regard would be the opening, where DeNiro hides a gun behind a cafe he is supposed to be meeting up in and then, making a point of going to the toilet so he can ensure the back door is open so he can get out if the going gets tough. By the way, that scene switches from the streets of France to a studio replica of the same cafe by use of a travelling matte shot which is, I think, impossible to spot unless you know it’s there (the old DVD version of this had a commentary track by Frankenheimer, revealing things like this). 

Other things of interest are DeNiro’s use of a cup of coffee to first deliberately spill to test the reflexes of Skarsgård’s character and, later, to ‘ambush’ Sean Bean’s character to prove a point to the people he’s working for. And there’s one scene where DeNiro is talking to an old colleague where they are using coded dialogue, pretending to be strangers, so DeNiro can get some information. It’s not until the end of the movie until you realise that the conversation was also deliberately ‘loose’ to an extent and serving as a kind of ‘double blind’ should any of his new colleagues be listening. 

Another interesting thing is that the film has three James Bond villains in it but, bizarrely, they never appear in any scene together. So we have Sean Bean who was the villain in Goldeneye (reviewed here), Jonathan Pryce who was the bad guy in Tomorrow Never Dies (reviewed here) and, in a wonderful scene following on from a really well done bullet removal sequence, Michael Lonsdale, who played the villain in Moonraker (reviewed here). Lonsdale has an especially important scene with DeNiro as he is working on a model of a scene from the famous story of The 47 Ronin, explaining things to DeNiro and pushing certain metaphors home. 

This is still one of the great ‘caper’ action movies by my book and I would love to see this in a cinema again because I remember it looked great on a big screen. And especially for how it sounds... the car chases are noisy and everything is really spot on and intense during certain scenes. Also... and I don’t see this in a lot of films, to be honest... there are a lot of civilians being killed or injured during the various shoot outs and car chases on the streets of whatever country the central characters happen to be in at the time. Not to mention the spectacular ice dance death fall of world champion ice skater Katarina Witt, as the inadvertent girlfriend of one of the bad guys of the movie. 

All this and a knock out score by Elia Cmiral which really serves the film well and is also a great listen as a stand alone CD. Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about Ronin and, I’m surprised there aren’t a load of books written about this particular movie. I also wonder, since their chemistry is just so good in this, why DeNiro and Reno were not put in any more movies together... they both knock it out of the park here and play off each other really well. Definitely add this one to your hit list if you’ve never seen this marvellous gem before.