Léon: The Professional (1994)
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THE SUMMARY: A young Natalie Portman learns to play GTA in real life, finding refuge and love with a neighbor hitman after her family is killed by a crooked DEA agent.
At first I thought it was odd to see such a young girl smoking. How naïve I was - by the end I was clenching with cringe watching scene after scene of sexual tension between a pre-teen girl and a middle-aged man, up to and including bed sharing. Yes, these are mostly scenes in the ‘extended cut,’ which I watched at the suggestion of several, and I’m glad I did, because it shows exactly what the movie producers wanted: pedophile fantasy (or hebephile fantasy, if you demand precision).
I saw it called ‘Cuties with guns.’ I could describe it as Joe Biden’s wet dream: the kid sniffing, the little girl begging for it, the corrupt federal abuse, etcetera. Either of these jokes are too kind to this trash, so call it what it is: the explicit sexualization of a 12-year-old girl. Not just no thanks, but fuck off.
FROM MOVIE-PICKER FULLSEMI1776: This is probably one of my favorite gun movies. Personally I consider it better than John Wick or even the Matrix scene where Neo walks past the metal detector. It's also where Natalie Portman gets her big break.
THE BEST:
There’s a less pedo-y version: I could see liking this movie if you watched only the shorter cut that mostly subtracts all the worst pedo-y scenes. The gun fights are cool. The characters, when they aren’t teasing the fantasies of kiddie chasers, are compelling. If you were completely oblivious to all the worst scenes and never knew they existed, there’s entertainment here.
However, ‘if you just delete the pedo-y stuff’ is not a defense of a good movie. The producers deleted the pedo-y stuff because they had to, not because they have moral limits. The extended cut is the director’s cut - it’s what he wanted to make, until the trash he made didn’t poll well. According to the movie’s Wikipedia page, the movie was only edited down after it was not well-received by Los Angeles preview audiences.
Too degenerate for Los Angeles is indeed far too degenerate.
The feds are almost as bad as the love story: It’s really saying something that a corrupt drug-addicted DEA agent who sells cocaine under his own cover and murders a family for crossing him is actually the less objectionable material in the story. But any time an alphabet agency is properly portrayed as the corrupt, unaccountable, self-serving, hypocritical bunch that they generally are, I’ll appreciate.
THE WORST:
It’s not even subtle, so there’s no denying it or explaining it away: I can hear the apologists now: but, but… Léon never acts on Mathilda’s advances - in fact he refuses ever to engage! First of all, not fucking a kid doesn’t make you a hero. That’s a baseline unremarkable story, not a compelling movie plot. Only in Hollywood is that an achievement. Second, Léon doesn’t resist all of it - he shares a bed with her. Third, even if Léon is innocent and morally square, the movie’s portrayal and indulgences aren’t. Here’s just a short list of things that happen that I won’t even post pictures or video clips of, because I never want to see them again:
12-year-old Mathilda does a Desmond-style scantily clad fashion show for Léon, bare skin and makeup included.
Léon and 12-year-old Mathilda go on a date during which she gets drunk and professes her love for him, begging for a kiss.
12-year-old Mathilda explicitly asks Léon to be her first.
Again, I’ll emphasize: 12-year-old Mathilda and Léon share a bed for the night, wrapped in warm embrace.
And even if you want to argue that Léon is a good guy for refusing, his objection to these scenarios (that he keeps repeatedly enabling) is not that it’s unacceptably wrong, but because he had a long-lost love. If only Léon hadn’t been heartbroken, perhaps he could have satisfied 12-year-old’s sexual fantasies. What a shame.
Even if you want to appreciate the movie’s story, roughly a quarter of it was cut out because it was totally unnecessary pedophile fantasy. I don’t care how good the rest of the movie is - that cancels it out.
It’s something of a true story: Worse still, Léon’s story is an apparent example of art imitating life. French Director Luc Besson met a child actress when she was 12, and he was 29. They say they started dating when she turned 15, and she gave birth to their daughter when she was 16. According to that woman, now his ex wife: ‘this love story between a 12-year-old girl and a 30-year-old man was… very much inspired by ours.’
This degeneracy isn’t even purely fictional. It’s something the director himself actually did, and flaunted it publicly for validation.
Besson has also been accused of rape by multiple women, and legal cases are still in development. Of course he deserves a presumption of innocence until proven guilty, but the accusations may be of relevant consideration.
That’s only the explicit surface level - the depths are much deeper: Allegedly, the original script called for a sex scene. It’s possible the script is a high-effort fake, but it looks and sounds believable. Another scrapped scene called for Léon to walk in on Mathilda naked in the bathroom (links are just YouTube descriptions, not graphic). According to Natalie Portman herself, this is where her parents drew the line.
THE RATING: 1/5 Wickies mandatory, on principle. I’d give it zero if I didn’t have to remake my system. I don’t do ‘well, once you look past the pedo stuff…’ Nope. Deal broken. It ends at the pedo stuff. I feel guilty for even watching it.
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NEXT WEEK: Heat (1995)
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