Ronin
As reviewed by James Brundage
OK. Here’s a movie about five people with fifty guns and unlimited ammo. Robert de Niro with his pleasant little mole is our friendly neighborhood ex-CIA mercenary. The mathematician from Good Will Hunting is our favorite ex-KGB traitor. The guy from The Professional? He’s a nice French mercenary, probably ex-French Secret Service. All of them are killers, all of them darkly comic and all of them after one thing: a nice steel box which has something in it that both the IRA and the Russians want.
It’s a movie of one-upsmanship: each scene is better than the last. Each car chase claims more cars, each shootout more lives, each scene, more time. From the French countryside to the highway tunnels under Paris, Ronin takes you, willing or unwilling, along a complex winding plot of people searching for a mysterious box because of the money… not to mention one or two of them may have an anterior motive.
Somehow, this psychotic inner child has a brain all of its own, coming up with its own plausibility and interesting traits (not to say it would be standard without them… it’s one of the finer action films I’ve ever seen), such as the title itself (a Ronin is a Samurai without a master). Then it turns around and has a car chase that makes Speed look like a little kid on a scooter. Yeah, come to think of it, it has so much fun shooting this way and that, it makes any action film look like a kid on a scooter… or worse. Some of them are still learning to walk next to this sweet thing.
Movie Reviews by James Brundage