"You think too hard”
“Nobody ever told me that before, but I wouldn’t go in there”
Inspired by domino I decided to pull out my 21 year old (!) MGM DVD of Ronin, complete with its generic player generated subtitles, and gave it another spin. I think I liked the film a bit more than domino did. It does seem affected to a bit of a fault for the first half, and a bit too in thrall to ‘cool’ characters doing ‘cool’ but at first inexplicable actions and treating each other with maximum ‘cool’ vibes (Natasha McElhone’s character at first seems to have an extraordinary superpower ability to be just six feet from the camera and the other characters and still be able to talk to the driver of a van or to her superior on the phone without us ever hearing what she is saying!) There is a lot of posturing going on here, though I concede that it could just be the normal stance of criminals! The viewer is kept very much at a distance from all the characters warily speaking to each other in blunt but coded terms about “the man from Bristol” and the “boat house at Hereford”, trying to feel each other out in the face of everyone having to play their cards constantly close to their chest. It can feel a bit like the much later Free Fire in that sense with the multi-national group of criminals doing something for some obscure reason feeling both an attempt at universality
and less charitably an attempt to skirt around any potentially awkward political dimension (though there is an eventual twist to that aspect in Ronin where this over-obscure approaches to each other and the attempt at lack of politics is damningly critiqued as actually being the point, and shown to be impossible to be skirted around because all you are left with then are individual mercenary goals that swing to even greater extremes of behaviour). But that coolness melts a bit after the first half of the film once the events start to hit home more directly, we get faces put to bad guys, and the characters cannot maintain a professional sense of detachment from their actions. Ronin makes that wary and guarded initial section into a bit of a virtue and is actually trying to do something with that rag tag band of misfits being thrown together and having to gel themselves into a team, and is also suggesting a kind of mercenary callousness towards the relatively low wage job (which it seems initially was only going to make each member of the group $40,000 until De Niro’s character ups it to $100,000!) which only becomes more obvious during the first heist sequence with scores of innocent bystanders either mown down at their fruit and veg stand or only just getting out of the way of the high speed car chase through the narrow streets of Nice, before we get to every member of the group becoming complicit in cold bloodedly murdering their targets. And then everything twists to actually having a villain to track and the McGuffin being sold to the highest bidder regardless of political allegiance (“Everyone’s your brother until the rent comes due”). I particularly love in the final sequence of the film that we get
three tiers of villains loosely representing political (Irish terrorist), national (the dreaded Russians) and personal (the psychopath just wanting his money) motivations, all double-crossing each other (natch!) that have to be systematically worked through to reach the prize!
I think more than the car stunts the really interesting aspect of the film is the interpersonal relationship one, with the De Niro character of Sam being the most capable and professional of all, asking questions that even the handler bridles at but not asking just to satisfy his curiosity or to score points in front of his colleagues (like the blustering Spence) but in order to cover all eventualities in the course of the job (“What’s in the case?” “That information is unnecessary” “Is it heavy? Is it explosive? Is it chained to some unlucky bloke’s wrist and we would have to chop it off?”). His character is the one constantly being shown as having it more together and eventually after the betrayal in the first heist he is the one to take over entirely and start building an effective team. The presence of Jean Reno also suggests this (as does the cafe coda scene amusingly!), but it is a kind of post-Mission: Impossible film too in that sense, just lower key and with more indiscriminate civilian deaths! (And I like that Sam immediately and perhaps too emotionally jumps to the conclusion that “the girl sold us out” which would make sense in a Mission: Impossible universe, but which is not entirely the case here!)
Over the course of the film as this ersatz gang falls apart through betrayal and double-crossing eventually the character’s pasts come back as something to fall back on in times of dire need (Sam's ‘high school colleague’ and Vincent’s French doctor friend able to help treat bullet wounds - “Do you think you could stitch me up on your own? If you don’t mind I’m going to pass out” - speak to this. Even Gregor's own past semi-friend does!) so all of our cut adrift masterless criminals end up returning (like the 47 Ronin) when they need help back to the organisations that had cruelly discarded them and their skills away to leave them roaming the world, scrounging around for piecemeal work that is beneath their talents just to survive. I suppose it is better to die in your organisation and for something than just as a mercenary left lying dead in the street with your throat cut and no one to mourn for you (or live as a conscienceless psychopath, as Gregor does). Maybe in the end it
is a political film, but about what happens when politics dies and the blunt force of capitalism comes in to fill that gap, making it a post-Perestroika film even before the Russian element appears to solidify that sense. I especially like that eventually our main characters, in danger of being cast adrift from the situation after the second big battle sequence, use those older and previously wilfully neglected political/organisational/national aspects to turn things back around onto their enemies by using that aspect as the clue to track everyone down through the Russian connection that hired them!
I had forgotten just how star studded the cast was. Here’s Stellan Skarsgard lurking in the background and looking studious in glasses and sat in front of a bank of blinking lights and beeping computers as the techno-whizz (but who might be placing too much faith in technology over skill); oh look, over there is Jonathan Pryce sporting a not entirely convincing Irish accent. I particularly like the contrast between Skarsgard’s coffee cup reflexes and Sean Bean’s! I like that the Sean Bean character’s hotheaded impulsiveness and cocky overconfidence leading him into danger makes him kind of the equivalent of the Mifune character from Seven Samurai! With the suggestion in the “boathouse at Hereford” comment that De Niro has caught on that Bean’s character has probably completely bluffed about his credentials to just get that far into the job. Only in this world there is no room for an enthusiastic amateur to settle down and eventually prove himself and he gets summarily dismissed after endangering everyone and almost blowing the whole gig at the very first stage of buying guns in preparation for the actual hard part to come. (I particularly like before we get to that scene of being dismissed we have a number of contrasts that already underline the ineffectiveness of the Sean Bean Spence character, from Spence pointlessly spraying a semi-automatic weapon around set against Sam and Vincent doing more targeted single shots which actually bring the bad guys down. Their more targeted shooting skills come into play later on as well)
The immediate working man blue collar rapport between De Niro and Jean Reno’s characters is nice, suggesting that pure mercenary behaviour might be good for covering your trail, but a respectful working relationship is potentially even more fruitful in a tight situation and the thing that will actually ensure that you survive a hostile encounter. I kind of like the rough and too familiar handling of the McElhone character by Sam in the 'scoping out the hotel' sequence too which, as with the brusque treatment of Spence, shows that the tables have turned on who is in control of the situation for the first of what turns out to be many such twists.
It is also nice that the driver Larry talks about getting a Nitrous system into the getaway car a year or two before The Fast and the Furious made that more of a mainstream term, though for all of his car skills he does not end up participating in a few of the later car chases! Those much celebrated car chases did feel very impactful, taking place in the middle of heavily pedestrianised city streets as the cars weave in and out of traffic at top speed with no compunction about the safety of anyone else on the road, moving from narrow, tightly packed streets to Princess Diana-like tunnels (I bet it was uncomfortable to watch some of the chase scenes only a year after that event! Although these days ramming another car straight into a crowded outdoor pavement cafe is probably the moment with the more uncomfortable resonances) and through intersections, making people scatter in all directions. They are the kind of sequences where you need not just the two main cars to be stunt ones and maybe one or two stunt drivers in vehicles that crash, but a hundred or more cars all working in unison whilst also making it all look chaotic, haphazard and accidental. The big thing that Ronin has over most other car chases on film is both that sheer mass of stunt vehicles taking part in elaborate staging (which is exactly the kind of thing that would get replaced by CGI and held in an anonymous interchangeable looking highway in something like The Matrix Reloaded later on - although that anonymity is part of the point of that scene in Reloaded, taking the artificiality to callous excesses), but also because it is all taking place in 'real world' environments with innocent bystanders screaming and running in panic from the situation (If this had been a much less serious kind of film I would have loved to have had a moment in all of the carnage of one Citroën just gently rolling to a stop without any impact and then
exploding into flames!) The car chase scenes themselves are heavily edited, so it is a lot of pieces of action rather than long fluid takes of all in one carnage, but this is a great example of how skillful editing and cross-cutting really builds the intensity of a scene more than otherwise might have been there. I never felt unclear about the action or where the characters were at in relation to each other, even when the film continually did cut aways to the small moments of destruction occurring in the wake of the high speed action. Especially good is the way that the lead car often causes incidents that the following cars then have to deal with, or not as the case may be!
Also: is there anything more beautiful than Natasha McElhone's hair blowing wildly in the wind as she drives in that final chase scene? Contrasted with De Niro's jerky and tense (but sharp and efficient) arm movements as he weaves the car back and forth through the same oncoming traffic.
I really like that putting innocent bystanders into cruel and unnecessary danger is a key theme to the criminal dealings throughout the film, not just the car chases! Even down to the climax! (Seriously, do these characters ever walk into
any building without five minutes later causing everyone to run out screaming in terror, in fear of their lives and with gunshots ringing in their ears? It is also blackly comical just how many women and children that Gregor threatens to shoot throughout the course of the film! And I also casually wonder if the desperate rush of a crowd from either the coliseum or the stadium was any influence on that Ilya Naishuller
music video!)
I also do really love that the film makes full use of the widescreen ratio, often piling in characters in the frame or having multiple planes of action. Not split-diopter as in De Palma, but there are always our main characters and the action going on around them (particularly on display in the hotel lobby photography sequence, where multiple planes of action is a key part of the sequence, but also there in the many car scenes or in the crowded seedy hotel rooms which always have other characters doing some bit of business elsewhere in the shot beyond the main action), which is a really nice touch. It also contrasts well with the more direct focus on the ice skating performance later in the film too (which instead gets intercut with simultaneous action rather than it taking place in the same shot, though there is a great ironic use of the TV screen paralleling the dressing room action!). There are always two or three things to pay attention to at any one time throughout this film, just as there are always two or three characters to keep in mind, and especially Sam usually has two or three actions playing out simultaneously also to mask his true intentions a little. I wonder if that is the Mamet influence on the storyline now that I am aware he had some input into it: the use of sleight of hand distracting tricks. It is a big ask of an audience member to keep abreast of everything going on but it has certainly grown on me much more revisiting it all these years later, so it may be one of those films that gets better with repeated viewings.
Oh, and I love just how much rampant graffiti is going on throughout this film! This isn't your prettified tourist postcard version of Paris, despite the view of the Eiffel Tower at night and the passing tourist boat on the Seine in that early 'cash for weapons' scene! And it was really amusing that the action stalls out (just before the final, biggest car chase of the film) because all of the characters are waiting for the (already delayed) post to get delivered! But if there had not been that delay there would never have been the opportunity to have caught up to the bad guys!