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Leon: I know she’s young, but she learns fast. Kids need to be shaped into something right?
Tony: Yeah, I know. I taught you that. But ain’t there an age limit?
The Professional, sometimes identified as Leon: The Professional, was a small film when released in 1994. Writer/Director Luc Besson, while popular in his home country of France, was a relative new-comer to mainstream U.S. audiences. Much of the cast, also, was not especially well known in the U.S. The Professional, a tale of human connections and vengeance in the world of organized crime, was an English-language film but largely a French production, resulting in a movie set in New York City with the stylings of a Euro-crime-thriller. Despite its oddball nature, The Professional was well received by critics (76% on Rotten Tomatoes as of July 2026) and has become something of a thriller classic, with an impressive 4.0 on Letterboxd, also as of July 2026. The movie features exceptional acting, skillful direction, and first-rate production values. But it is unquestionably, absolutely, definitely, 100% a movie we shouldn’t love.
At $19.5 million ($45 million globally), The Professional was only #72 in 1994 U.S. box office revenues. As I’ve similarly noted in some of my previous “Movies We Shouldn’t Love” entries, the top box office movies in 1994 were far more stylistically diverse compared to contemporary hits: the top ten moneymakers in 1994 included The Lion King, Forest Gump, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Interview with the Vampire. (Compare that to 2025’s top ten list, weighted down with VFX/IP/Disney/Warner behemoths.) Steven Spielberg received the Best Director award at that year’s Academy Awards for 1993’s Schindler’s List. Pierce Brosnan was announced as the next James Bond. Speed appropriately propelled Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves into global fame. Rose Byrne, Marion Cotillard, William Fichtner, Cameron Diaz, and Jude Law, among others, had their film debuts. All in all, it was a good year for movie buffs, and The Professional fit in nicely.
The Professional has its roots in an earlier Luc Besson work, La Femme Nikita (1990). In La Femme Nikita (literally, “The Woman Nikita”), Anne Parillaud portrays Nikita, a street addict convicted of murder after a robbery goes wrong and she kills a police officer. Bob (Tchéky Karyo) recruits Nikita into a secret government agency, offering her a reprieve from prison if she becomes a highly-trained assassin. Nikita becomes what amounts to a French Jason Bourne, dispatched on missions that prevent any kind of personal life. Jean Reno plays a supporting role as Victor, a “cleaner,” someone who solves problems in a way that may or may not involve murder. High-brow critics called La Femme Nikita sensationalistic, but it was popular enough to inspire remakes in both Hong Kong (Black Cat (1991)) and the U.S. (Point of No Return (1993)) and two TV series – La Femme Nikita (1997 – 2001) and Nikita (2010 – 2013).
Facing production delays while preparing to film his 1997 release The Fifth Element, Besson cast about for an interim project. He came up with a story about a cousin of Victor from La Femme Nikita, also a cleaner but living in New York City. This character, Leon (Jean Reno again), lives alone in a nondescript apartment building and carries out executions ordered by Old Tony (Danny Aiello). Leon’s minimalist existence is disrupted when the corrupt and unstable DEA agent Stansfield (Gary Oldman) orders an over-the-top hit on a corrupt underling – a small thief stealing from the big thief – who happens to live, with his wife and three children, in the same building as Leon. The family is killed except for a daughter, Mathilda (Natalie Portman), who seeks shelter with the unsuspecting Leon. Mathilda, plotting long-term revenge against Stansfield and his crew, persuades Leon to share the strategies of his trade with her. (“The closer you get to being a pro, the closer you can get to the client.”) Everything comes together in a gonzo shootout that leaves Leon and Stansfield dead, Tony bruised and battered, and Mathilda going back to school where she belongs.
We learn, through backstory, that Leon’s family was killed when he was a child, and he is an immigrant to the U.S., making him a variation of the classic lonely hero, the man (and in the movies they are usually men) who has chosen a life of behind-the-scenes monasticism over a conventional path of office, home, and family. Le Samourai (1967), featuring Alain Delon as an uber-professional lone hitman, was one of Besson’s inspirations. Leon’s solitude is symbolized in the film’s opening shot, panning over water to the borough of Manhattan, an island just like our protagonist. The entire opening set-piece, when Leon dispatches his target with the near-invisibility of a ninja, shows us that Leon works (and exists) alone. It seems inevitable that this loner will eventually form a bond with Mathilda, another island, alone with her abusive father, neglectful mother, narcissistic sister, and only her younger brother for companionship. It is her brother’s death that Mathilda seeks to avenge. In this context, Leon follows the trope of the loner who opens his heart only to lose his life, or something close to it, as a result. See Heat (1995), The American (2010), and Relay (2024) for a few examples; or, for that matter, most of the Bond movies, as 007 is nearly always tripped up when he allows himself to be distracted by a woman.
The film conveniently ignores the ethics of Leon’s work – we simply trust that he is doing away with bad people. (In a true conundrum, we learn that Old Tony has ordered assassinations for Stansfield, meaning Leon may have been working for his future nemesis – maybe Leon’s final outcome is karma?) He drinks milk and Old Tony manages his money, giving Leon a gentle and childlike nature – it is implied, but never clarified, that Leon might be developmentally disabled. At the very least, he hasn’t matured to adulthood in any conventional way. This helps justify Leon’s willingness to carry out hits based solely on Old Tony’s instructions; it is also an attempt to justify his awkwardness when Mathilda claims to have romantic feelings for him. His only stable connections, before meeting Mathilda, are Old Tony and a houseplant which Leon carries everywhere. The plant indicates that, underneath Leon’s cold exterior, he has a wish to put down roots; it also presents him as a nurturer at heart, ready to help someone like Mathilda when she needs it the most. In other words, The Professional is a classic tale of a gallant knight saving a damsel in distress, except in this case the damsel is a teenager who wants to kill people.
The female assassin – or women who take up weapons in some other pursuit – is a recurring premise in Besson’s projects: La Femme Nikita, The Messenger (1999), Lucy (2014), Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), and Anna (2019) all offer variations of this premise. These women almost always first need to be saved or guided by a man: The Fifth Element (1997) is one of the most grievous examples, when the fifth element of the title (Milla Jovovich) is sidelined in her own movie to make room for a taxi driver (Bruce Willis) engaged in manly hijinks in manly ways with other men. So, in The Professional, Mathilda needs to be rescued by Leon, more than once, before she can begin her journey. At its most basic level, The Professional is Luke Skywalker being set on the path to Jedi Knight-hood by Ben Kenobi, just with a lot more gunplay and shouting.
Whether or not you like his movies, Luc Besson has a clear skill for directing suspense thrillers. The Professional is perhaps peak Besson: tension builds in all the right places, action scenes are brilliantly played out with optimal use of settings (one action sequence makes effective use of overhead shots to show us the layout of Mathilda’s family’s apartment), and character dynamics are efficiently established. Many exterior scenes were filmed in New York City, adding to the film’s credibility. All the other elements of a “good” film are in place: the pacing, lighting, music, and acting are all first-rate. It may have helped that Besson was working with a familiar group: he had completed one or more prior films with Jean Reno, Eric Serra (composer), Thierry Arbogast (cinematographer), Patrice Ledoux (producer), Dan Weil (production designer), Magali Guidasci (costume designer), and the Gaumont production company. Serra, who has scored most of Besson’s films, only a year later shook up the Bond franchise, for better or worse, with his score for Goldeneye (1995); he composed the song “The Experience of Love” for The Professional‘s end credits, but when Besson chose to use Sting‘s “Shape of My Heart” instead, Serra recycled the song for Goldeneye‘s end credits. The fact that so many in the cast and crew were French gives The Professional another of its appealing qualities, as noted earlier: this is a hybrid French/U.S. production, an American thriller with a European aesthetic.
Regarding the cast, every performance is spot-on. Danny Aiello, always a pleasure to see, is suitably weary as the aging crime boss. Jean Reno plays the savant to perfection, professionally savvy but naive in the complexities of human relationships. Gary Oldman has well earned a reputation as a chameleon, playing over-the-top (Dracula, Winston Churchill) and subtle (George Smiley, James Gordon) with equal genius. His Stansfield in The Professional is of the over-the-top variety, framing his crimes in reveries of drugs and classical music. Like Leon and Mathilda, Stansfield, despite commanding a bounty of flunkies, is an island, able to relate to no one, alone in his drug-induced delusions of grandeur. Oldman improvised the infamous scene, when Stansfield demands that his henchmen bring him “EVERYONE,” as he describes in this interview.
The standout performance, of course, is Natalie Portman in her first big screen appearance. It’s astonishing that someone so young and inexperienced could give Mathilda such depth and plausibility. It’s tempting to compare Portman’s Mathilda with Jodie Foster‘s Iris in Taxi Driver (1976). Two girls becoming young women, damaged by violent men in ways beyond their control, who both end up returning to school where we trust a better life awaits them. The crucial difference is that Iris is objectified by a deranged “protagonist” who considers her salvation his purpose in life, whereas Leon resists the impulse to save Mathilda, and takes on the burden of training her only with great reluctance. In both cases, casting of such young actresses – both were 12 years old during filming – in violent films, and in roles that were mature beyond their years, raised legitimate questions.
During filming of Taxi Driver, a social worker was available to Foster, and her older sister stood in for her in the more “sexually suggestive” scenes. This level of care doesn’t seem to have been available to Portman. However, both actresses have credited their respective roles with being positive turning points in their careers. Of course, we know one of the tragic outcomes surrounding Taxi Driver: the movie, and Foster’s role in it, became absorbed in the delusions of John Hinckley Jr. leading up to his attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981, ultimately causing the death of White House press secretary James Brady. Thankfully, no known assassination attempts have tarnished The Professional. But the sexualization of young women for the sake of entertainment, particularly for such violent entertainment, gets to the heart of why we shouldn’t love The Professional.
Watching the international edition of The Professional, with several scenes deleted from the U.S. release, invites even more discomfort. Mathilda actively participates in Leon’s hits; Mathilda tries to seduce Leon; the two characters even share a bed, though fully clothed. The film’s content is entirely and legitimately debatable: Besson’s position was that some scenes would be humorous, as someone of Mathilda’s age clearly could not understand the significance of such adult interactions. Europeans are stereotyped as more open to sexuality, while American audiences are considered comfortable with violence but sexually repressed. (The lopsided application of U.S. film ratings to sexual content vs. violence certainly lends credence to this.) Even Leon, with his traumatic childhood and nonexistent personal life, cannot be expected to give a suitable response to Mathilda’s flirtations. It’s all perfectly innocent, yes?
It seems sensible that the final verdict on the subject should come from Natalie Portman herself, but even she seems to have mixed feelings about the movie and its implications. In interviews at the time and in later years, Portman has generally described the experience in positive terms. From the Armchair Expert podcast: “The Professional really means a lot to people, which is very cool. … It was really fun for me.” And yet, in the same interview: “…being sexualized as a child, I think, took away from my own sexuality, because it made me afraid…” This is the film that launched her career, and yet in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, she said, “…when you watch it now, it definitely has some cringey, to say the least, aspects to it.” After the film’s release, she received a letter from a male admirer describing her as the object of a rape fantasy. A radio station conducted a countdown to Portman’s 18th birthday, and not for the purpose of cake and ice cream. Observing Portman’s thoughtfulness and positivity today, it’s easy to overlook the impact of these experiences.
And what of Luc Besson? According to French actress Maïwenn Le Besco (who, professionally, goes by simply Maïwenn), the Leon/Mathilda relationship in The Professional was inspired by her own relationship with Besson. Born in 1976, Maïwenn was only 15 when she met 33-year-old Besson; she was 16 when she gave birth to their daughter. Besson left her in 1997 for Milla Jovovich (born in 1975), who was then starring in The Fifth Element. In his work, Besson clearly has what Roger Ebert described as, in his review of The Professional, “what seems to be an obsession with women who kill as a profession.” And the women in question are always young: In Besson’s Subway (1985), the protagonist (Christopher Lambert) promises to return stolen documents to his married love interest (Isabelle Adjani) on the condition that he can keep a photo of her as a young girl. I don’t know what psychological significance this might have, but in 2018 Besson was accused of rape by actress Sand Van Roy, who had appeared in Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. This prompted other women to come forth with accusations of “inappropriate sexual behavior.”
Multiple investigations in France cleared Besson of the rape charge and prohibited Van Roy from pursuing further legal action. Van Roy also charged Besson in Belgium, where he was again acquitted on the basis that Van Roy’s complaint was “inadmissible.” Is this a cultural matter? Are those wacky Europeans more open to male philandering and misogyny? That’s hard to imagine, given current circumstances in the U.S. However, the #MeToo movement does appear to have played out differently in France. #MeToo in the U.S. became #BalancTonPorc (Denounce Your Pig) in France. (It’s pure irony that in The Professional, Leon uses a pig puppet to entertain Mathilda.) As much as I appreciate the name, #BalancTonPorc was only halfheartedly received. About one hundred prominent French actors, academics, artists, and others, including Catherine Deneuve, signed a letter, published in Le Monde in 2018, calling the movement a “witch hunt”; while acknowledging (thank heaven!) that rape is a crime, they claimed that the #MeToo / #BalancTonPorc movement had gone too far, and that flirting, propositions, and “being touched up on the Metro” are really not a big deal.
So is this all about differences of culture? As of 2025, the European Institute for Gender Equality reported that France actually has better gender equality when compared to European averages, with an overall gender equality index of 73.4 (based on income, employment, education, health, government representation, and other factors), compared to 63.4 for the EU as a whole. At the same time, the High Authority for Equality Between Women and Men (HCE, an organization of the French government) reports increasing levels of “discrimination, violence, and harassment” against women; a 2025 survey sponsored by HCE found that 37% of French women had been victims of non-consensual sex. It’s hard to find perfectly corresponding data, but the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC) found that 81% of U.S. women experienced some form of sexual harassment or assault at some point in their life. A 2025 finding by the Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ruling on a truly horrific case) determined that the French legal/judicial system had failed in properly punishing non-consensual crimes against minors, and that French judges had demonstrated a pattern of victim-blaming and gender-stereotyping in sexual assault cases. The problem isn’t just “in real life” – the French government determined that Facebook discriminates on the basis of gender. (At this point, are we ever surprised at evil behavior from Facebook?) Another complication in comparing the two cultures is that the media in each country, both France and the U.S., tend to dumb-down reporting on feminism and equal rights in the other country: these are not monolithic movements in either nation, but diverse beliefs and viewpoints that can never be reduced to a simplistic summation.
And we haven’t even touched on the responsibility of us, the audience, endorsing these projects with our dollars and euros. Or the duties of individual filmmakers, production companies, ratings boards, and parents: in both Taxi Driver and The Professional, the parents of Jodie Foster and Natalie Portman expressed reservations but still allowed their daughters to be cast. And aren’t we viewers better for it, given the strong body of work created by both actors?
Either way, Luc Besson was hardly “canceled,” “disappeared,” or whatever term the dude-bros prefer these days. He has fallen somewhat out of favor; his film school l’Ecole de la Cite closed in 2023 due to a dramatic decline in private funding. He continues to write and direct movies with mixed results: his Dogman (2023) and Dracula (2025) were both box office disappointments, moderately received by audiences, with Letterboxd ratings of 3.3 and 3.1, respectively. None of his recent films demonstrate the kind of sticking power of La Femme Nikita or The Professional. (Including, somehow, The Fifth Element, with a 3.8 on Letterboxd but which is so bad I felt generous in rating it 2 out of 5 stars.) He had planned a sequel to The Professional, resuming Mathilda’s story in adulthood. He was unable to hang on to the film rights, so his notes were recycled into a spiritual descendant directed by Olivier Megaton, the disappointing Colombiana (2011).
More than thirty years after The Professional’s release, Gary Oldman, Natalie Portman, and Jean Reno have all become widely beloved actors, and the movie continues to have a passionate following. It’s easy to find reviewers on the Web or YouTube who rank it among their favorite movies. I confess that I still enjoy it; even my wife enjoys The Professional, and she’s much smarter than me. At the same time, numerous recent Letterboxd reviews call out the film for the way Mathilda is presented, as did professional reviews at the time. Perhaps the best conclusion is from Roger Ebert’s original 2.5-star review: “But always at the back of my mind was the troubled thought that there was something wrong about placing a 12-year-old character in the middle of this action. …in what is essentially an exercise – a slick urban thriller – it seems to exploit the youth of the girl without really dealing with it.” That might be the bottom line where The Professional is concerned. If we’re going to love this movie, there are some matters we need to deal with.
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