Robert
De Niro stars as an American intelligence operative adrift in
irrelevance since the end of the Cold War--much like a masterless
samurai, aka "ronin". With his services for sale, he joins a renegade,
international team of fellow covert warriors with nothing but time on
their hands. Their mission, as defined by the woman who hires them
(Natascha McElhone), is to get hold of a particular suitcase that is
equally coveted by the Russian mafia and Irish terrorists. As the scheme
gets underway, De Niro's lone wolf strikes up a rare friendship with
his French counterpart (Jean Reno), gets into a more-or-less romantic
frame of mind with McElhone and asserts his experience on the planning
and execution of the job--going so far as to publicly humiliate one team
member (Sean Bean) who is clearly out of his league. The story is
largely unremarkable--there's an obligatory twist midway through that
changes the nature of the team's business--but legendary filmmaker John
Frankenheimer (Seconds, The Manchurian Candidate) leaps at the material,
bringing to it an honest tension and seasoned, breathtaking skill with
precision-action direction. The centrepiece of the movie is an
honest-to-God car chase that is the real thing: not the
how-can-we-top-the-last-stunt cartoon nonsense of Richard Donner (Lethal
Weapon) but a pulse-quickening, kinetic dance of superb montage and
timing. In a sense, Ronin is almost Frankenheimer's self-quoting version
of a John Frankenheimer film.There isn't anything here he hasn't done
before but it's sure great to see it all again.