Ronin

Most big budget spy films are often cartoonish action fare with an emphasis on spectacle (explosions, gunfights and car chases) and very little intelligence or interesting characters. Aside from the smart, visceral Jason Bourne films, the only mainstream film to credibly mix brains and brawn in the last fifteen years has been Ronin (1998). This is due in large part to the efficient direction of veteran filmmaker John Frankenheimer, a lean, no-nonsense screenplay written by J. D. Zeik and by David Mamet (under the guise of Richard Weisz) and a solid cast featuring the likes of Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgard, and Sean Bean.

The set-up is this: a group of mercenaries from all over the world assemble in France and are given a mission to steal a briefcase with unknown but what they believe to be very valuable contents inside. The group consists of an American driving expert named Larry (Skipp Sudduth); Spence (Sean Bean), a British weapons man; Gregor (Stellan Skarsgard), an ex-KGB computer expert; Vincent (Jean Reno), a French equipment man; and Sam (Robert De Niro), a veteran tactician from America. They are in turn briefed by a mysterious Irish woman named Deirdre (Natascha McElhone) who we later learn gets her information from a fellow IRA operative, Seamus O’Rourke (Jonathan Pryce).

Because they are all doing this for money no one trusts each other and there is palpable tension under a façade of bravado, dry humor and professional respect. This is exemplified by great one-liners, like when Spence asks Sam, “You ever kill anybody?” to which he responds dismissively, “I hurt somebody’s feelings once.” I love the scene early on where the newly assembled team sniffs each other out. This is where Mamet’s dialogue shines as the various personalities of the team surface: Spence is the cocky Brit; Sam is the sarcastically evasive American; Vincent is the quietly confident Frenchman; and Gregor is the no-nonsense ex-KGB man.

The first action sequence involves a gun deal that goes sour. What stands out in this scene more than the superbly staged action are the little details, like the look on Sam and Vincent’s faces when they realize that they’re walking into a set-up. Afterwards, Vincent thanks Sam for protecting him and a bond develops between the two men that comes from surviving intense, life and death situations. Their relationship is well-played by the two-actors. I also like that Frankenheimer takes the time to show Sam and his team discussing the plan to steal the case. They talk about tactics and, at one point, Sam and Deirdre scout the target and the team protecting it in order to get an idea of the exact number of opponents, how skilled they are and so on. We see just how clever and experienced Sam is in this scene. We also see that a lot preparation goes into a job like this and one can never be too prepared, especially when they are not given all the information.

The group gets the case but one of their own betrays them and takes off with it. This kick-starts a thrilling cat and mouse game through the streets of Paris as Frankenheimer orchestrates action sequences with the kind of ruthless efficiency that would make Michael Mann green with envy. For the most part, they are realistically depicted. Nobody wastes hundreds of rounds before reloading, the actual battles don’t last long, and innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire are killed. Ronin was justly praised for its very exciting car chase sequences. No laws of physics are grossly violated as these guys pursue each other in and around the narrow streets of Nice or through the streets of Paris. You can tell that actual stuntmen drove these cars at high speeds and they were actually crashed, not done later with computer graphics. These sequences work so well not just because they are exciting, well shot and edited, but because they are just as important to the narrative of the film as everything else. They have a purpose as opposed to many other action films where car chases are used as filler to distract the audience from the lack of story, character and so on. It should also be pointed out how cleanly executed these scenes are with refreshingly fluid camera movements so that you get an idea of what his going on and where. There is a nice lack of disorienting hand-held camerawork and these sequences are not hacked to pieces with frenetic editing but done in a way that conveys speed and urgency.

Ronin is also refreshingly free of simple good guy/bad guy roles. They don’t exist in this world because all of the characters are imbued with both of these qualities. For them, this job is strictly business and when it becomes personal that is when mistakes are made. Robert De Niro turns in his last truly great performance to date as the experienced soldier-of-fortune. Like his character in Heat (1995), he’s all business and dedicated to the job at hand and nothing else. He’s ably supported by the always watchable Jean Reno as the steadying hand of the group. He plays the reliable guy so well and exudes a quiet dignity that is fascinating to watch. Frankenheimer wisely plays up the mutual respect between De Niro and Reno’s characters. One wishes that by the film’s conclusion these guys would do another project together, especially as the characters in Ronin.

David Mamet’s lean script reflects the characters it depicts. These are professional soldiers who don’t have time to waste on idle chit-chat. They have been hired to do a job and do it well – that’s what they’re getting paid for. His screenplay also provides a window into the post-Cold War espionage world (as he would also do later on with Spartan). It’s an open market with all sorts of ex-soldiers from all over the world selling their services to the highest bidder. After all, what do career soldiers do in between wars? Mamet only hints at this early on when Vincent laments to Sam about their profession, “Seven fat years and seven lean years.” The “fat years” would seem to refer to the time when these guys were employed by their respective governments and enjoyed all kinds of perks. Now they are in the “lean years” doing jobs purely for money. This exchange also establishes early on the bond that begins to form between these two veteran warriors.

At the heart of Ronin is an intriguing discussion between Sam and Jean Pierre (Michael Lonsdale), Vincent’s former boss and the man who tends to a gunshot wound Sam receives in a skirmish. While resting from impromptu surgery to remove the bullet, Jean Pierre relates to Sam the story of the 47 samurai and the Warrior Code:

“The Forty Seven Ronin, do you know it? Forty-seven samurai whose master was betrayed and killed by another lord. They became ronin, masterless samurai, disgraced by another man’s treachery. For three years they plotted, pretending to be thieves, mercenaries, even madmen (that I didn’t have time to do). And then one night they struck, slipping into the castle of their lord’s betrayer, killing him … The warrior code, the delight in the battle. You understand that, yes? But also something more. You understand there is something outside yourself that has to be served. And when that need is gone, when belief has died, what are you? A man without a master.”

Sam speaks of surviving to retirement even though most of his friends have died before they could achieve it because in their line of work longevity is a rarity, eventually everyone’s luck runs. It’s a topic Mamet would explore in greater detail in films like Spartan (2004), Red Belt (2008), and the television show The Unit.

In 1997, president of United Artists Lindsay Doran met with director John Frankenheimer about a project shortly after she received the screenplay for Ronin. She was a big fan of his films and felt that Ronin was perfectly suited for him: “I’m a supporter of the idea of hiring people who have practically been forgotten. There are an awful lot of filmmakers who stop getting hired when they’re 60 or 55 or even 50.” When Frankenheimer read the script it reminded him of action films from the 1960’s and 1970’s: “What appealed to me too was that it was an intelligent suspense thriller. At heart it’s a film that questions our ethics and the meaning of honor and what it means to ‘do one’s job.’” Doran and United Artists decided to hire Frankenheimer based on his work on Andersonville (1996), television miniseries for TNT in which he won an Emmy for direction.

In terms of camerawork, Frankenheimer eschewed a stylized approach to create what he called a “heightened reality” and achieved this with wide angles and a depth of field. The director hired French cinematographer Robert Fraisse based on his work on the HBO film Citizen X (1995): “I saw that Robert knew how to work within the confines of a schedule, and knew the demands of an American production.” Ronin was shot in a brisk 78 days with an additional 30 days of second-unit work done by Frankenheimer and Fraisse.

For the three car chase sequences, Frankenheimer employed the same techniques he utilized on Grand Prix (1966). According to one of the film’s stunt coordinators and professional race car driver Jean-Claude Lagniez, 150 drivers were used with cars going as fast as 120 miles per hour. Approximately 80 cars were wrecked in scenes where whole sections of Nice and roadways in Paris were temporarily closed down. He and Michael Neugarten were among the drivers hired to do the stunt driving. The director had clearly done his research as both men had won their respective categories at Le Mans the year before. Lagniez said that Frankenheimer insisted the cars during the chases travel at full speed: “If I’m going to do a car chase, I’m going to do a car chase that’s going to make somebody think about whether or not they want to do another one!” The director did some shots with the actors in real cars by using English right-hand drive vehicles. The stunt driver would be actually driving the car and a fake steering wheel on the left would be for the actor. This allowed Frankenheimer to photograph the actors “driving” the cars. The director storyboarded all three chase sequences, generating hundreds of drawings that were used as a guide on location, allowing him to improvise at a given moment if he were so inclined.

A minor controversy broke out brief over screenwriting credit. J.D. Zeik wrote the original script and then David Mamet was brought in to either do a bit of script doctoring or rewrite it completely, depending on who you believe. Frankenheimer claims the latter as he said an interview, “We didn’t shoot a line of Zeik’s script.” Zeik’s attorney claimed that Mamet was brought in at the last minute before principal photography to “beef up De Niro’s role,” added Deirdre as a love interest for Sam and rewrote several scenes. The lawyer claimed that rather than give his client – a then-up and coming screenwriter – sole credit Mamet included his name in order to receive greater residuals. Zeik’s attorney appealed to Mamet’s lawyer to let his client have sole credit but was rebuffed. Mamet tried to apply for sole writing credit but the Writer’s Guild ruled that credit should be given to both Zeik and Mamet. Already burned by the WGA over credit for Wag the Dog (1997), and in protest, Mamet used the pseudonym of Richard Weisz on Ronin. Furthermore, Zeik’s lawyer then accused Frankenheimer of dropping his client “to curry favor with David Mamet.”

Ronin received mixed reviews from critics at the time. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and praised Frankenheimer’s handling of the material: “Here, with a fine cast, he does what is essentially an entertaining exercise. The movie is not really about anything; if it were, it might have really amounted to something, since it comes pretty close anyway.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin raved about the film’s car chases: “Proving that the greatest excitement an action film can offer is the spectacle of real derring-do performed by real people, Mr. Frankenheimer stages three sensational French chase sequences in settings that prove astonishing, under the circumstances … these scenes are nothing short of sensational. Mr. Frankenheimer directs them in fast, efficient, no-frills fashion because no extra frills are needed.” Time magazine’s Richard Schickel wrote, “Unvexed by boring details, which usually just compound the implausibility of action movies anyway, we are free to appreciate the sheer stylishness of Ronin. This derives from the counterpoint between Mamet's verbal manner—weary, knowing, elliptical—and director John Frankenheimer's bold visual manner.”

However, Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “I wish Frankenheimer had done more with Stellan Skarsgard's icy genius sociopath. Ronin is ''well-crafted,'' but it's also empty — a joyless thrill ride … In a movie like this one, speed itself starts out as excitement and ends as desperation — as a race out of the void.” In his review for the Washington Post, Michael O’Sullivan wasn’t nearly as taken with the film: “Despite some ingenious touches, as when Sam and Deirdre pose as tourists to snap photos of their elusive quarry, much of the time Ronin feels like a high-brow Steven Seagal film, with massive gun battles that casually disregard civilian casualties and too many overlong car chases through the twisty streets of Paris and Nice.” New York magazine’s David Denby concurred: “Ronin is well-made, but it's an act of connoisseurship for people who have given up on movies as an art form.”

Frankenheimer and Mamet created a fascinating world of international mercenaries that at once seems realistic and also very cinematic in nature with its exciting car chases and gun battles. The director brought years of experience as an excellent journeyman director to Ronin. He didn’t waste time with needless exposition and showy style. Like the characters in the film, he’s there to get the job done while also delivering an entertaining movie, harkening back to his Classic Hollywood contemporaries like Don Siegel. Ronin would be one of Frankenheimer’s last films (the less said about Reindeer Games the better) and it is a fitting swan song for the man who unfortunately died in 2002.

SOURCES

Harrison, Eric. “Mamet Versus Writers Guild, the Action Thriller Sequel.” Los Angeles Times. August 5, 1988.

Magid, Robert. “Samurai Tactics.” American Cinematographer. October 1998.

Ronin Production Notes. 1998.

Sterngold, James. “At the Movies: High-Speed Espionage.” The New York Times. September 11, 1998.

Weinraub, Bernard. “Thriving on an Atmosphere of No Illusions.” The New York Times. September 13, 1998.

Mission: Impossible

A lot was riding on Mission: Impossible (1996) for Tom Cruise. Not only was it the first film he produced (in addition to starring), it was also his first attempt to kick start his own film franchise. What better way to do this than resurrecting a classic television show from the 1960s? Cruise, always the calculated risk taker, wisely surrounded himself with talented people: Robert Towne (among others) co-wrote the screenplay, Brian De Palma directing and the likes of Jon Voight, Jean Reno, and Vanessa Redgrave in the cast. At the time, the James Bond franchise was in a transitional period and didn’t produce a new film until the following year. Despite a well-publicized troubled production, rife with clashing egos, Mission: Impossible was a huge box office success spawning a franchise that continues to produce installments.

Jim Phelps (Voight) leads his group of IMF agents on a mission to intercept Alexander Golitsyn (Marcel Iures), a traitorous attaché who has stolen a list of code names for all of the CIA operatives in Europe. He plans to steal the other half of the list with their real names from an embassy in Prague. One by one, members of the team are killed off by mysterious assailants. Ethan Hunt (Cruise) survives the bungled mission and rendezvous later with his superior, Kittridge (a wonderfully twitchy Henry Czerny) in a restaurant. Over the course of their conversation, Ethan realizes that he was set-up and that another team was shadowing his own. Kittridge reveals that the embassy debacle was actually an elaborate scheme to expose a traitor within the IMF organization and he believes that it is Ethan and that he also killed his entire team.

De Palma conveys Ethan’s growing sense of paranoia and panic in this scene through increasingly skewed camera angles as the magnitude of what has happened begins to sink in. Henry Czerny plays the scene beautifully as Kittridge talks to Ethan as a parent might scold a child. The conversation between them culminates with a daring escape as Ethan causes a large aquarium to explode, using the ensuing chaos to make his getaway. This scene was Cruise's idea. There were 16 tons of water in all of the tanks but there was a concern that when they blew, a lot of glass would fly around. De Palma tried the sequence with a stuntman but it did not look convincing and he asked Cruise to do it despite the possibility that the actor could have drowned.

Ethan regroups at a safe house where he meets Claire (Emmanuelle Beart), another surviving member of his team. He must find out who set him up and retrieve the list. To aid him in his endeavor, Ethan enlists the help of Claire and two other disavowed agents Luther Stickell and Franz Krieger (Ving Rhames and Jean Reno). The film really gets going once Cruise hooks up with Reno and Rhames (playing an ace hacker no less) and they decide to break into CIA headquarters for what is Mission: Impossible’s most famous set piece. This impressively staged sequence is cheekily dubbed the “Mount Everest of hacks” by Ethan and is masterfully orchestrated by De Palma. The heart of this sequence is nearly soundless, proving that one doesn’t need a ton of explosions and gunfire to have an exciting, tension-filled action sequence (Michael Bay take note).

It is interesting to note that at the beginning of the film, Ethan is not the leader of the IMF team but rather Phelps is the point man. It isn’t until most of the team is killed off during the Prague embassy mission that he’s forced to go it alone. He even tries to form a new team with Franz and Luther but even that doesn’t stick with the former turning out to be a traitor, leaving only Ethan and Luther at the end. The film is an epic test to see if Ethan has what it takes to survive on his own and have the ability to complete the mission with limited resources. Obviously, he is successful which paves the way for subsequent sequels where he’s the team leader.

Initially, Cruise plays Ethan as a cocky upstart not unlike his characters in Top Gun (1986) and The Color of Money (1986) but that bravado is stripped away when everything he knows is taken away from him. He’s running scared and after his meeting with Kittridge, increasingly paranoid. After being disavowed by his own government, who can he trust? Cruise is excellent in these early scenes as Ethan is in a sweaty panic, trying to figure out what happened. That being said, in some scenes, the actor has a tendency to over-emote, like when Ethan is reunited with Claire after their entire team has been wiped out. Sleep deprived and paranoid, Ethan yells at Claire, “They’re dead! They’re all dead!” It’s an embarrassing bit of overacting on Cruise’s part but the actor redeems himself somewhat later on in a cheeky bit of acting when he cons Reno over a CD of vital information through a clever display of sleight of hand.

De Palma constantly plays with our perception, showing us the Prague mission three times: once as it happens, then from Ethan’s point-of-view as he recounts it to Kittridge and then at the end from Phelps’ perspective where we learn what actually happened. The director pulls out his usual stylistic bag of tricks: the P.O.V. tracking shots, the Dutch angles, the diopter shots, but unlike The Untouchables (1987), for example, it feels subdued perhaps supporting the stories of behind-the-scenes meddling that diluted the purity of his trademark style. It is a testimony to his prowess behind the camera that Mission: Impossible still works as well as it does and this is due in large part to bravura sequences like the CIA HQ heist, which is one of De Palma’s most memorably orchestrated sequences.

As far back as 1982, Paramount Pictures owned the rights to the television series and had tried for years to make a film version but had failed to come up with a viable treatment. Cruise was a fan of the show since he was young and in 1993 thought that it would be a good idea for a film despite the discouragement of those around him – that is until The Fugitive (1993) came out. The actor chose Mission: Impossible to be the first project of his new production company and convinced Paramount to put up a $70 million budget. Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner worked on a story with filmmaker Sydney Pollack for a few months and then the actor saw and liked certain sequences from Carlito’s Way (1993) and hired Brian De Palma to direct. After the commercial success of The Untouchables (1987), the director had box office duds with the likes of Casualties of War (1989) and The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and was desperate for another hit. “Did I take it hard? Absolutely. When you spend two years making a movie and no one sees it…it hurts. You take it personally.” Even Raising Cain (1992) and Carlito’s Way didn’t make as much money as he’d hoped and he thought, “’Well, I’d better change everything and go back to Untouchables.’ Take a T.V. piece people were familiar with and make something new out of it.”

The screenwriting team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) wrote a draft and then Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List) was next in line, but he could only commit for six weeks. He and De Palma hammered out a storyline in that time. “I mean, going over every way to go about this story, staring at each other across the coffee table until we came up a scenario,” the director said. Zaillian gave way to De Palma’s go-to scribe, David Koepp (The Shadow) who was reportedly paid $1 million to rewrite it and had quit smoking before starting work on it only to be driven to start up again while writing it. According to one project source, there were problems with dialogue and story development. However, the basic plot remained intact. Koepp worked on it until he had to start making his director debut Trigger Effect (1996) and this prompted Cruise to bring in his own go-to writer, Robert Towne to work on the script. According to De Palma, the goal of the script was to "constantly surprise the audience.”

Amazingly, even with all of these talented screenwriters working on it, the film went into pre-production without a script that the filmmakers wanted to use. De Palma designed the action sequences but neither Koepp nor Towne were satisfied with the story that would make these sequences take place. Towne helped organize a beginning, middle and end to hang story details on while De Palma and Koepp worked on the plot. According to Towne, “On any given day you’d think it was disaster. But after while, you knew it was working.” Koepp admitted that he and De Palma discovered separate plot holes in the script and they knew “that the plot would beat us, we were never going to beat it.”

The director convinced Cruise to set the first act of the film in Prague, a city rarely seen in Hollywood films at the time. Reportedly, studio executives wanted to keep the film’s budget in the $40-$50 million range but Cruise wanted a “big, showy action piece” that took the budget up to the $70 million range. Rumors circulated that Cruise and De Palma did not get along during filming on location in London and Prague. One rumor had the actor holding a stopwatch on the director during filming. Both men denied these rumors. Cruise said, “I mean there was pressure, there’s always pressure…But I think it’s, like, tension to me is when you hear stories about two people not talking at all, okay?” Koepp said, “Yep, no shortage of opinions on this movie. No one was going to roll over and let the other’s creative opinion rule the day.”

Cruise was a quick study and would observe his stunt double at work and then do the stunts himself. This included a flip on top of a train with a 175-mile-per-hour wind in his face, outrunning an exploding aquarium full of water, and the now famous dialogue-free sequence where Ethan breaks into CIA headquarters hanging upside down while using a computer, which was a direct lift from Jules Dassin’s 1964 heist film, Topkapi. While filming it, Cruise’s head kept hitting the floor as he was off balance. He put a bunch of English pound coins in his shoes and this provided the balance he needed.

The film’s last act was the source of most of production’s tension with De Palma sending last minute faxes to Koepp and Towne begging for revisions to the script. The director had read Towne’s original ending and hated it. “Bob thought we could resolve the movie with a character revelation in the boxcar, leaning toward a Maltese Falcon type of ending.” De Palma came to Cruise with the high-speed chase scene on top of the train. He knew it would add millions to the budget but felt the film “needed this visceral ending to work,” and Cruise agreed.

The actor wanted to use the famously fast French train the TGV but rail authorities did not want any part of the stunt performed on their trains. When that was no longer a problem, the track was not available. De Palma visited railroads on two continents trying to get permission. Cruise took the train owners out to dinner and the next day they were allowed to use it. For the actual sequence, the actor wanted wind that was so powerful it could knock him off the train. Cruise had difficulty finding the right machine to create the wind velocity that would look visually accurate before remembering a simulator he used while training as a skydiver. The only machine of its kind in Europe was located and acquired. Cruise had it produce winds up to 175 miles-per-hour so it would distort his face. Most of the sequence, however, was filmed on a stage against a blue screen for later digitizing by the visual effects team at Industrial Light & Magic.

The filmmakers delivered Mission: Impossible on time and under budget with Cruise doing most of his own stunts. Initially, there was a sophisticated opening sequence that introduced a love triangle between Phelps, his wife Claire and Ethan that was removed as it took the test audience "out of the genre," according to De Palma. There were rumors that Cruise and De Palma did not get along and they were fueled by the director excusing himself at the last moment from scheduled media interviews before the film's theatrical release.

Despite the large revenues, the film received a mixed reaction from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, "This is a movie that exists in the instant, and we must exist in the instant to enjoy it.” In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden addressed the film's convoluted plot: "If that story doesn't make a shred of sense on any number of levels, so what? Neither did the television series, in which basic credibility didn't matter so long as its sci-fi popular mechanics kept up the suspense.” USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and said that it was "stylish, brisk but lacking in human dimension despite an attractive cast, the glass is either half-empty or half-full here, though the concoction goes down with ease.”

Time magazine’s Richard Schickel wrote, "What is not present in Mission: Impossible (which, aside from the title, sound-track quotations from the theme song and self-destructing assignment tapes, has little to do with the old TV show) is a plot that logically links all these events or characters with any discernible motives beyond surviving the crisis of the moment.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “The problem isn't that the plot is too complicated; it's that each detail is given the exact same nagging emphasis. Intriguing yet mechanistic, jammed with action yet as talky and dense as a physics seminar, the studiously labyrinthine Mission: Impossible grabs your attention without quite tickling your imagination.”

The film’s overriding theme is one of deception, a world where nothing is what it seems. The prologue has a disguised Ethan trick a captive man into giving up a name of a key operative. This is only one of many disguises (created by make-up legend Rob Bottin) he adopts throughout the film in order to obtain information or trick an opponent. The prologue also cleverly serves as a metaphor for filmmaking. The spy trade, like cinema, is all about creating an illusion and pretending to be something that you’re not. In addition, several members of his team are not who they appear to be as well and this keeps the audience guessing as to who is “good” and who is “bad.”

The common complaint leveled at Mission: Impossible was that it was hard to follow, fueling speculation that De Palma’s original cut was non-linear in nature and that Cruise re-cut it after disastrous test screenings. Regardless, if one is paying attention to what is happening and what is being said (or not being said, in some cases) it isn’t difficult to navigate the film’s narrative waters. The script is lean and unusually well-written for a big budget action blockbuster, which is quite amazing when you consider how many writers worked on it. Make no mistake about it; this is a paycheck film for De Palma. However, being the consummate professional that he is, the veteran director still delivers an entertaining film with some nice stylistic flourishes. What more could you ask for from this kind of film?

SOURCES

Brennan, Judy. "Cruise's Mission." Entertainment Weekly. December 16, 1995.

Friend, Tom. “Man with a Mission.” Premiere. June 1996.

Kroll, Jack. “Mission Accomplished.” Newsweek. May 27, 1996.

Penfield III, Wilder. "The Impossible Dream." Toronto Sun. May 19, 1996.

Portman, Jamie. "Cruise's Mission Accomplished." The Montreal Gazette. May 18, 1996.

Green, Tom. "Handling an impossible task – A Mission complete with intrigue." USA Today. May 22, 1996.