Ronin (1998)

Official trailer

Ronin is John Frankenheimer’s 1998 American action thriller.

The film depicts a multinational team of former intelligence operatives assembled to retrieve a mysterious briefcase being transported across France. The team includes American Sam, Frenchman Vincent, German Gregor, Irish operative Deirdre who coordinates the operation, and weapons specialist Spence. The operation proceeds through escalating violence as multiple parties pursue the briefcase whose contents the operatives never learn. Robert De Niro plays Sam. Jean Reno plays Vincent. Natascha McElhone plays Deirdre. Stellan Skarsgard plays Gregor. Sean Bean plays Spence.

Jonathan Pryce plays IRA operative Seamus O’Rourke. Michael Lonsdale plays Jean-Pierre, Vincent’s friend, who builds miniatures. J.D. Zeik and David Mamet wrote the screenplay, with Mamet’s contribution credited under the pseudonym Richard Weisz due to Writers Guild arbitration. United Artists produced the film on a budget of approximately 55 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 70 million dollars worldwide.

Give me grown men who know their jobs, doing them in real cars on real streets, and I’m happy, and Ronin gives me exactly that. I get a jolt from it that few modern action films manage. What keeps it from climbing higher for me is a plot so crowded with competing parties that I stop caring who has the case.

John Frankenheimer showed his continuing capacity for action filmmaking at age sixty-eight with Ronin, one of his foundational late-career productions.

Frankenheimer had directed The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seven Days in May (1964), Seconds (1966), and a wide range of other films before Ronin. His ability to construct extended car chase sequences gave the film operational sophistication that other action filmmakers have rarely matched. The Paris and Nice car chases use actual location filming with practical stunt driving instead of digital effects.

The briefcase whose contents remain unrevealed for the entire runtime acts as a deliberate MacGuffin that the film treats as a structural device, not an object the audience needs to understand. The Mamet dialogue contribution gives the film verbal precision that pure action filmmaking wouldn’t have produced.

The Car Chase Sequences

Frankenheimer directed two major extended car chase sequences across Paris and Nice using practical stunt driving and actual location filming.

The first chase moves through Nice including the Promenade des Anglais and local streets. The second chase moves through Paris including tunnel sequences filmed months after Princess Diana died in a Paris road tunnel. The decision to film without digital effects required real preparation, professional stunt drivers, and location permits that later work might have refused.

The chase sequences have aged into recognition as among the strongest in modern action filmmaking.

Later productions including The Bourne Identity (2002) and others traced their approaches partly to Ronin. The combination of practical driving, real locations, and traditional editing techniques produces material that digital effects work can’t replicate. The pattern of practical action filmmaking producing material that digital alternatives can’t match has continued. Some sequences require the actual physical operation instead of the simulated alternative.

The chases are why I rate this an 8. You can feel the weight of the cars and hear the engines straining, and I think the Paris chase is as good as car chases get.

The MacGuffin Briefcase

The briefcase contains some object that multiple parties want to retrieve.

The film never reveals the contents. Characters reference it as the package or the case without describing it. Several characters die pursuing it. This briefcase is a MacGuffin in the technical sense Alfred Hitchcock defined: an object whose specific identity doesn’t matter, only that characters pursue it.

The decision to never reveal the contents follows traditional MacGuffin construction. Audiences who would prefer to learn what the briefcase contains find the film frustrating. Audiences who accept that the briefcase is a plot driver and not content receive the film as the action thriller it intends to be. The operation matters. The character interactions matter. The package itself matters only as motivation for the operations and interactions. The structural choice requires confidence that the audience will accept the convention. Frankenheimer trusted his audience to understand traditional cinema construction.

I’m on Frankenheimer’s side here. Knowing what’s in the case would only shrink it, and I enjoy watching a room full of professionals kill each other over a box nobody opens.

The De Niro Performance

Robert De Niro plays Sam with the controlled professionalism the character requires. Sam is a former CIA operative whose age and experience give him operational competence that the surrounding team gradually recognizes. The performance plays competence instead of displaying it through theatrical demonstration. De Niro shows Sam at work without making the film look like performance. The technical quality of the operational practice is the heart of the film’s action material.

This is the late De Niro performance I’d point to first. He’s relaxed and dry, a man who clearly finds the younger crew a little silly, and his scenes with Jean Reno are my favorite stretches of the film.

The Sam character shows aging professional competence that few action films center on. Most action films emphasize physical youth and dramatic combat. Ronin centers on a fifty-four-year-old performer playing a character whose age gives him advantages that younger operatives lack. The work has continued through later aging-professional action films including the John Wick series. The pattern assumes that competence accumulates with age in ways that young heroes can’t replicate.

Is Ronin worth watching?

Of Frankenheimer’s late-career action films, Ronin is the strongest, and its practical car chases hit harder for me than anything a computer has produced since. The unopened briefcase is the right call, and De Niro plays Sam’s competence without showing off. I dock it two points for a story that gets more crowded than it needs to and a supporting cast I’d have liked to know better. Watch it for the chases and stay for De Niro and Reno trading dry looks.

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