This isn’t a review, but I’d been meaning to watch _The Professional_ for a while and caught it on OnDemand(tm) tonight. The quick and dirty version is that a hitman who is disconnected from life and spends his days in an emotionless routine comes to the rescue of the scared, scarred, and world-weary young girl next door when her abusive parents and younger brother are shot in a drug deal gone bad. Mathilda forces Leon to reconnect with the world, and he shows her that life is worth living and good people (that is, good bad people, or is it bad good people?) do exist in the world.

What I got from this film was nothing like I expected: rather than cute and schlocky, it was violent, dark, thoughtful, full of uncomfortable sexual tension — and brilliant. Natalie Portman’s film debut here shows clearly the actor she was to become, and sets her up as that “wise beyond her years” young girl that plays so well in later films. Jean Reno is great as the hitman of few words but a big heart. But don’t be fooled, this movie doesn’t get sappy, nor does it cross that scary line into pedophelia — it plays everything just right, skirting the edges, staying true to the story and the characters, to a story about love, not sex, not violence, not despair.

The only thing I didn’t like about the film is that I felt like some of the angles simply weren’t fleshed out enough — Leon is training Mathilda to be a “cleaner,” but we never get to see how far she goes, whether she has the skills, whether she’ll follow through with a job. She has an inappropriate infatuation with him, clearly leading somewhere, but we never see how that plays out. It was interesting to see on IMDb that the director’s cut of the film, at 24 minutes longer and released in Europe, addresses just these issues, and is even more of a character driven film. It figures that the US test screenings would want more bloody action and less complex characters. Now I’m gonna go have to buy the DVD. Damn you, Amazon Prime!