LEON (Directed by Luc Besson. Starring Jean Reno, Gary Oldman, Natalie Portman, Danny Aiello)

The latest hitman to stalk the silver screen has better moves than his immediate predecessors (Travolta and Jackson in Pulp Fiction) but none of their entertaining dialogue. Leon opens with a stunning pop-art, post-modern action sequence in which the unseen assassin wipes out a hotel full of mobsters, then fades away without having said a word. Perhaps there is a language problem here, this being the first American film of pyrotechnically gifted French director Luc Besson (Subway, Nikita, The Big Blue), starring the melancholically charismatic French actor Jean Reno (who has appeared in most of Besson’s films, and starred in last year’s massive Gallic hit Les Visiteurs). Evidently post-synched, Reno’s voice is deep and vibrant, but his accent is thick and it is often so difficult to make out what he is saying you begin to long for the subtitles of Besson’s French work. Still, Reno doesn’t have a lot to say, being an illiterate loner whose only companion is a house-plant.

The sentimental and frankly laughable device of having a hardbitten assassin who is so enamoured of a potted plant that, in a crucial sequence, he risks his life to save it, suggests that the real problems here are Besson’s usual ones: characterisation, plotting, content. Which would, admittedly, be a pretty comprehensive list if he wasn’t so kinetically talented. Leon is admirable on many levels, crammed to bursting with stunning set pieces, awesome art-directed shoot-outs, witty visual diversions, florid camera movements, crisply kinetic editing and amusing performances, but its not about anything, apart from the iconography of other movies. The hit-man lives an almost monastically austere lifestyle, as has been the way for hit-men ever since Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai. He trusts no one, and lets no one into his life, until, despite his worst instincts, he helps a twelve year old girl whose family are being wiped out in a vicious drug-dealing battle. Such things happen in the movies, and, as is the filmic way with relationships, from initial antagonism the two principals warm to each other. She, of course, will be his downfall, and he will be her saviour, because that is the way things go in Hollywood. It’s that old chestnut: the killer with the heart of pure mush. In his second venture into the world of the paid assassin, Besson has outdone himself, making a movie even flasher, more dazzling and more blatantly stupid than Nikita.

The only respect in which the film deviates from the norm is a genuine deviation: Besson plays the relationship between the coquettish, sexily attired child (Natalie Portman) and the grizzled old murderer almost as a romance. They flirt, they declare love for one another at a crucial moment, and, by my reckoning, we are only spared intercourse by the timely intervention of the police. This may be the most blatantly paedophiliac film since Lolita, although perhaps it is merely moviephiliac. Besson may well have made the female character a child for plot reasons, then put her through the motions that he has seen (adult) female characters go through on screen. I have long been an admirer of his films, especially Subway, which seemed to suggest a soul at the heart of his impressive machinery, but since then I have come to the conclusion that he steals emotional moves from other movies (usually rendering them null and void in the process) and mistakes sentimentality for spirituality. His direction does not so much represent a triumph of style over substance as his complete failure to allow any kind of substance to impinge on his excessive stylishness.

Leon is worth catching for its polished visual edge, several stunning shoot-outs, Gary Oldman’s hammy villain and Reno’s hang-dog hero, but despite the director’s apparent enthusiasm for its sentimental conclusion, Besson fires emotional blanks and could empty his whole cannon of tricks into the cinema audience without actually making them flinch.