Ronin Review
by Victory Marasigan (vmaras1 AT gl DOT umbc DOT edu)October 2nd, 1998
RONIN (1998)
Review by Victory A. Marasigan
http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~vmaras1/reviewsidx.html
The Ronin were a group of shamed samurai in feudal Japan who sold their services after the death of their slain master. With _Ronin_ (**1/2), director John Frankenheimer and writers J.D. Zeik and Richard Weisz attempt a modern-day take on the concept, but whatever historical comparison they intended to make seems to have been lost in all the noise and spectacle of what is an otherwise enjoyable distraction of a movie.
The Ronin in this tale are a group of mercenaries who have been assembled to retrieve a silver suitcase somewhere in France. The operatives are strangers to each other and to their employer, and don't even know the contents of the case they are chasing after. This premise is intriguing, but the movie quickly reveals itself for the high-class escapist junk we've already seen in umpteen James Bond movies.
To make up for the deficits in character and plotting, Frankenheimer throws in some excellent high-speed car chases, arguably the best thing about the movie. The labyrinthine streets of France become the world's biggest Hot Wheels Playset, complete with statuesque roundabouts, loopy turns, and of course, bins full of seafood for the smashing. These sequences, showcasing grand cityscapes and killer mountain roads, are deftly executed adrenaline rushes, at least worthy of your local second-run theater's admission price.
It is to Robert DeNiro's credit that he is able to block our view of the derivative story line on his own for about half an hour before we begin to suspect something is afoot. As the shadowy soldier-of-fortune Sam, DeNiro is charismatic and cool, able to assault someone with something as simple as a strategically-placed cup of coffee. By necessity and by design, Sam assumes the role as the group's strategist, uniting the ragtag bunch into a competent team.
The other Ronin are not quite as well-drawn. Natascha McElhone (_The Truman Show_), as a former terrorist, is the next most interesting member of the group, displaying a dichotomy of toughness and sensitivity. Actors Sean Bean(_Goldeneye_) and Jean Reno (_The Professional_) fill out the rest of the team with vivid, if routine, performances. As their icy nemeses, fine thespians Jonathan Pryce and Stellan Skarsgard seem to serve no purpose except to stuff the roster with more actors with foreign accents. The film stifles the acting skills of most of its talent, then commits the unforgivable offense of asking the audience to sit back and accept the characters' lack of knowable motivation or sympathizability.
The writers have gone through the conceit of making their story as layered as possible, but alas, the facade is all too transparent. "Intelligent" appears to have been confused with "incomprehensible," as _Ronin_ jumps from one scene to the next without quite making clear what was so important about the scene before. The questions pile up, only to be wiped away cleanly by another exhilarating car chase which literally kills off those loose ends. A warning to the unsuspecting movie-goer: any attempt to sort out who is loyal to whom in this story may cause severe cerebral hemorrhage. Don't think. Just wait for the car chases.
Rather than give us too little opportunity for introspection (as is the case in many modern films), _Ronin_ gives us too much, so that the overall scheme of the film resembles nothing so much as a box bull of blank jigsaw puzzle pieces.
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