RONIN directed by john frankenheimer written by david mamet and starring robert deniro

i love the way the geopolitics of these ex-military guys' situations is both totally absent (since its never really made entirely clear who they are, what they used to do, what theyre doing right now except in the vaguest sense) and totally suffocatingly present

this movie is front to back amazing and i love it

can't believe we haven't had a thread on it!

yeah its like never been talked about on ILX at all

my dad's been telling me to rent this for years

your dad otm

mamet's obsession with masculine competence is well done here. i can take or leave it otherwise, tbh, but here it's great.

the only bad thing about this movie is richard pryce's irish accent!

Last good DeNiro?

there must have been a thread at some point

i love stellan skarsgaard in this!

who among us does not enjoy katarina witt getting clipped?

xp the cast across the board is excellent, but yeah skarsgaard is particularly good

also, great car chases for people who don't like car chases (me)

sean bean is tight and the character he plays is really cool too: spy movies don't have enough blustery losers in way over their heads -- and then, the character doesn't get killed off! they actually figure out he's full of shit and send him packing.

everything cool about bourne is a lift from this film

Natascha McElhone

LOVE HER.

everything cool about bourne is a lift from this film

I say bullshit on this. None of these guys had a hand-to-hand throwdown like the three Bourne has.

yeah true, i was being CONTROVERSIAL

i was thinking abt the relationship between the bournes and this, and i think this definitely counts as a progenitor--this doesnt have great hand-to-hand combat but it has a lot of other stuff that comes through

you get the sense that all of these dudes have their hand-to-hand throwdown days long behind them

deniro is basically old bourne

with a sense of humor

the scene w/ skarsgaard and the coffee cup = clearly dude had kicked some ass in his KGB days

These are all good points. Sorry. I'm a little punchy today.

What about S8 tear-assing around Paris? HOLY SHIT.

i love that scene but dudes quoting "what color is the boathouse at hereford" gets old.

i was thinking about the awesome car stunts in the bourne movies, but the scene in this where they're speeding through oncoming freeway traffic takes it for me.

there's an essential seriousness to the violence: bullets are tiny little things but they'll cut right into your fucking body. the guns sound like guns (ie, like fake guns! pop pop). even hoary old movie tropes like a car chase through some cafe tables looks really awful -- i think the movie is edited really well, it lingers for an extra beat on the collateral.

****

that's a great point, gff

RONIN SO AWZ

the fact that the spraypaint is still wet on the decoy macguffin is a bit silly to me. and the bit with michael lonsdale is goat cheese. but natascha mcelhone is smoking hot, pryce is a great bastard, and yeah basically the most amazing cinema-landmark car chase since probably Bullitt.

i think frankenheimer got special dispensation to have car- and gun-fights in paris; you can tell he loves the city something fierce. and yet, the statement seems to be that a chase or gun battle in your neighborhood would actually seriously suck! as if anyone could think otherwise...

I'm immune to a lot of movie car chases, but the ones in this actually did have me clutching the arm rests (esp the early chase at night in Paris)

Utterly great movie!

I LOVE THIS MOVIE SO MUCH

SO MUCH

yeah its like never been talked about on ILX at all

-- max, Thursday, December 20, 2007 7:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

never been threaded i guess but i mention it eveyr chance i get!!

i just ambushed you with a cup of coffee

i did a google search for ronin and deniro and you were like the only person who came up slocks

so rock on dude!!!

you know who else is great in this? JEAN RENO

:D

There has been speculation as of late that a sequel was to be filmed somewhere in Asia, with De Niro and Reno reprising their original roles alongside actors James Franco, Charlotte Rampling, and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai[citation needed].

the long shot of the chase down the wrong side of the freeway, so epic!

there's some sort of alternate ending on the DVD versh, anyone know what happens?

he gets the girl

oh wait no I think he's ABOUT to get the girl but as she's about to go into the pub where he's waiting she's kidnapped by random interlopers in a van

and he never knows what happens

Ronin-lovers should also back up 34 years and see The Train. Frankenheimer had it goin' on for a long long time.

The Train does indeed slay soft silly suckas.

Nice - time to upgrade my old DVD.

okay after catching part of this in a hotel recently i have to admit that the coffee scene really is one for the ages. i also think de niro's very best cool-customer tough-guy performance ever might be in the "you don't wanna go in there" bit, just before that.

Spence: "You know, you think too hard."
Sam: "Nobody ever told me that before. But I wouldn't go in there."

Haven't listened to the commentary or any extras yet, but it's great to see a good transfer, because the existing version was crap. The ambiguity of the plot's direction after the heist, where we think we know the end goal but the characters don't know how to get there, and the denouement where Deniro's character's actual goal is revealed, would have been a wreck in less capable hands.

The car chases and gunfights are so insanely well-done, and you could teach a master class on how to shoot action based on those scenes!

The Northern Ireland angle still seems like a trite wrap-up to add historical weight to the action of the movie, though. It's really not necessary, imo

It's all about the Sam/Vincent relationship. Even when they barely know each other, Vincent gives Sam two cigarettes when he asks for one, and simply says "for later". It's almost wordless, and dreamy.

It really is. Every other person involved has a different take on the situation: Spence is 86ed for being a fake, Gregor has an actual job he's doing unbeknownst to the others, Larry is so businesslike you assume he's devoted to the work regardless of who he's working for. Sam seems to be in the same boat as Larry but is under suspicion, and Vincent decides to throw his lot in with Sam at the beginning and the job is secondary to making sure Sam succeeds.

It's the "old habits die hard" bit from RONIN (1998) https://t.co/atS0FjQ6kv

— Michael Tae Sweeney (@mtsw) March 4, 2020

i'm sure this is old news to everyone but i had gone this far without reading it so, just in case it helps you in these difficult times: if you like this movie then you might like the book the day of the jackal by frederick forsyth.

ooooooh you know i have never read that

thx caek

it often has this incredibly weird non-fiction style. i just read bad blood (business narrative book about theranos with a straightforward style) and the tone is very similar. i guess that's because it's proto-competence porn and as such spends a lot of time describing precisely what people are doing and a lot of what are basically training montages in word form.

also fair warning: the sex scenes are terrible verging on offensive.

also fair warning: the sex scenes are terrible verging on offensive.

It's funny; I don't remember there even being sex scenes, but I read it 35+ years ago, so I must have been right in that pre-teen zone between "don't notice sex scenes" and "read books exclusively for the sex scenes".

Hmmm this is very tempting to read, I do like scenes of competent dudes doing things, but I'm worried it's a step into airport dad books from which I may never recover

i've read airport dad books. it's a level above that.

There must be competence porn books/films with mainly female characters, but I can’t think of them?

There must be competence porn books/films with mainly female characters, but I can’t think of them?

Wallace Stroby has a whole series of books about a female professional thief. Thomas Perry's The Burglar is also really good.

Salt (2010) with Angelina Jolie wasn't the worst action thriller of its kind. Or maybe it was; at one point she took off her panties and used them to cover a surveillance camera.

There must be competence porn books/films with mainly female characters, but I can’t think of them?

Greg Rucka's Atticus Kodiak novels.

One more warning: DOTJ also has an extremely crudely homophobic scene in a gay bar toward the end

I interpret "airport dad books" as any books resembling those assembly-line books that were ghostwritten for Tom Clancy, upon which he put his name, in big letters on the covers. yeah, Day of the Jackal exceeds that dismal level.

Greg Rucka's Atticus Kodiak novels.

Add his Queen & Country novels, though the series starts as comics before it becomes booky books. (His MO is basically female action heroes being good at their jobs (and not much else).)

Amused to see DOTJ come up, since I just rewatched the film the other night. Not sure how it compares to the book, but the film breezes by for its 145 minutes of men doing things competently. Also, Michael Lonsdale!

Ah, Ronin. Always a pleasure to watch.

watched this yesterday! the sheer amount of innocent people who eat it in this movie is a little unsettling but the action sequences are so well-done. the last car chase is maybe a little too long, the slaloming through incoming traffic seems like it goes on for just a bit longer than is plausible even considering the suspension of disbelief necessary to buy into the kind of movie, but that’s my only minor beef

I second most of the praise in this thread for the directing and acting, and I think the fact that so much is unexplained for most of the movie actually works in its favor. the one scene I didn’t see mentioned that I thought was great was between vincent and juan-pierre as sam is recovering from the surgery, where they discuss whether sam’s still working for the CIA. vincent’s like “why would he put himself through all that? he could make one call and it’d be taken care of.” juan pierre just kind of raises an eyebrow and takes a long sip of his tea, like...”ok kiddo”

also: “you labor or management?”

tbh i could stand 10-15 minutes of additional slaloming through incoming traffic

agree

i was pretty hard on this movie five years ago, but it's stuck in my brain a lot more clearly than most 90s action movies that i've only seen once all the way through. would def watch again.

the only correct answer is that it rules

everyone gets there eventually

yeah one thing that was obvious was that this would be something I could easily see myself rewatching

i love rewatching this movie years apart bc i forget everything about it and get to totally reexperience how good it is

i first watched it with my parents around when it came out on video and i remember thinking it was so tonally different from every action movie i had enjoyed before, which only drew me deeper into its pull

The other day I saw someone on Twitter describe Michael Clayton as "a god tier Dad Movie" and instantly thought Um...you're not wrong, but what about Ronin?

Twenty-give minutes into this movie and it's pretty great.

welcome

buckle up!

👍🏽

so jealous.

Sean Bean is such a puke in this movie

This movie was so good I started watching it for the second night in a row.

ronin-pilled

i was pretty mixed on this movie when i first saw it upthread, but it stuck with me and i found myself wanting to go back and watch the best bits. saw it on the big screen tonight, and was very satisfied. looks great, sounds great, plays great.

solid q&a afterwards with Jamelle Bouie and John Ganz, whose smart and engaging podcast Unclear and Present Danger sifts through the politics of 1990s thrillers. they were good! good time at the movies!

grab a folding chair & a coffee mug

solid q&a afterwards with Jamelle Bouie and John Ganz, whose smart and engaging podcast Unclear and Present Danger sifts through the politics of 1990s thrillers. they were good! good time at the movies!

― Doctor Casino, Friday, December 13, 2024 8:30 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

burying the lede!! this is sick

yeah sign me up

Fun podcast but JB is such a better host/spieler, it seems a bit unfair on the other guy

Ganz is a helluva good political writer.

I need to read When the Clock Broke.

It's terrific.

Also, I swear, lol, I thought the co-host was Janelle Monáe.

their podcast is great, can confirm