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Ronin (1998), John Frankenheimer [3/5]

Writer's picture: Miles StephensonMiles Stephenson

Updated: Aug 28, 2024


If Heat (1995) and Mission Impossible (1996) had a baby that took itself too seriously, hired a weirdly melodramatic composer that reuses the same couple leitmotifs, and struggled with issues of thematic consistency, you would have Ronin. But you would also have a movie that features the best car chase sequences since Billy Friedkin's To Live and Die in LA (1985) due to two important factors: motivated movement and parallel cutting.


Before we can praise its formal qualities, we have to discuss the narrative elephant in the room. Legendary director of Seconds and The Manchurian Candidate John Frankenheimer is so heavy-handed about the masterless samurai who became ronin being an allegory for De Niro and his team that the whole scene in the middle of the film feels like it has flashing lights above it: “Hey look, this is the message of the movie!” Besides this shoehorned lesson about disgraced warriors, most of the film is about the double-crossing non-state warfare of Cold War operatives who can't be trusted — including even our lead De Niro who *spoilers* wasn't paramilitary this whole time but actually still involved in the CIA.


But without the humor or entertaining gadgetry of Mission Impossible or the musings on what it takes to live an itinerant life of crime without love or connection like in Heat, you have a movie with this main lesson: the old are more experienced than the young and that no one in the den of thieves can be trusted. Watch any handful of random crime thrillers and you could glean that; it's not much of a lesson.



But who's to say that a film must have a good lesson and can't just be an enjoyable aesthetic experience? Does a movie need a plot? No. (if you had asked me a couple years ago I would have said yes but I wrote a piece here about how watching a movie everyday for a year changed my mind on this question.) It doesn't need a plot, but it does need a vibe, an aesthetic current, a presentation. Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive (2011) doesn't have much of a plot but it's one of my favorite movies of all time because it uses images to evoke nearly all of its important "story" moments.


Another example, one of my favorite novels, Blood Meridian, doesn’t have much of a "plot" strictly speaking. There’s a kid that runs away from home before saddling up with a band of bounty hunting scalpers embroiled in a range war in 1840s Southwest. But that’s not what I remember from the book. I remember the atmosphere and the images, the smell of gunpowder, the cannibal riders, the darkness of the frontier. A movie can’t play images in your head like reading so it has to show them to you; its selection and presentation of these images decide if the film is memorable and evocative. I can't recall any images from Ronin except the car chase sequences, which remain some of the most expertly framed and exhilarating set pieces in the genre.



Mamet’s name has become synonymous with this kind of masculinist, athletic dialogue. While the script never soars to the heights of Glengarry Glen Ross' iconic “coffee is for closers,” De Niro has some fantastic punchy manly prose:


Spence: You worried about saving your own skin? Sam: Yeah, I am. It covers my body. Sam: You're great in the locker room, pal, and your reflexes might die hard, but you're weak when you put your spikes on. Sam: Everybody wants to go to the party. Nobody wants to stay and clean up.



Take De Niro's Sam, the old grizzled operative, and his friendship with Jean Reno's Vincent, and put them in a film with a more meaningful story (something that reaches the level of spirit and emotion in Heat) and you’d have a masterpiece of 90s high-speed, special ops thriller instead of a half-baked story with compelling spectacle. That said, maybe Ronin is one of those films in the tradition of Melville's Le Samouraï (1967), those laconic gangster noir flicks that are more interested in form and technique than content or "message." Not every film has to exude a meaning or even a good story; some are just taking you along for an aesthetic ride. I just prefer some others in that tradition like Thief (1981), Collateral (2004), and Drive (2011), but if you've seen all of those, Ronin might be worth a watch. 3/5.





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