Few films have the verve, style and bravura to embrace its preposterous premise and run wild with it as Leon: The Professional does. And perhaps only Luc Besson could have pulled it off. The improbable plot, in which 12-year-old girl Natalie Portman befriends milk-drinking mob hired-gun Jean Reno when her family is slain, is more suited to the world of manga or comic books, but Leon invests enough heart and soul in the characters to make us believe in them. Bookended by a pair of top-notch, crisply executed action sequences, the film is absurd, brilliant, operatic, sentimental, thrilling, emotional, silly at all once. It’s like Jacques Tati meets John Woo or something – it shouldn’t work, but it does. The original American release chopped out a lot of the risqué character stuff between Portman and Reno, but this release is the international cut, and it's the one to savour. Portman is plucky and charismatic, giving a fine, fine first-feature performance, Reno endearingly stoic, and Oldman, over-the-bloody-top. Besson’s masterpiece.