by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

Ronin is badass.

The title, we learn, refers to a wandering samurai without a master, and later hear a retelling of the legend of the 47 ronin.

Badass movies are a hard one to get right. It’s a whole genre unto itself. Sometimes the lead is a laconic type—he doesn’t say much, but he’s got a hell of a glower. Or, when someone does say something in the movie, you want to look to the person you’re watching it with and say something like, “That was badass.” 

So often, what ends up happening is that you have an attempt at something that’s badass and it just doesn’t work out right. You can tell that’s what they were going for, but you can’t meticulously craft something to be cool. Cool just happens. It’s organic. And it can never, ever be forced.

Ronin, as a movie, is little more than a series of really cool, badass events with the loosest of plots concocted as a framework from which to hang these setpieces. There’s a mysterious briefcase, a MacGuffin lifted so directly from Pulp Fiction it doesn’t even try to pretend otherwise. There are double-and-triple-crosses galore. Car chases. Grenade launchers. Assassinations. Gruff, monosyllabic dialogue between acting veteran toughs. And it all works so well somehow.

In 1998, when Ronin was released, it seemed like this kind of material was beneath Robert DeNiro. The guy was known for classics—long away were the days when DeNiro was appearing in goofy comedies and dime-a-dozen thrillers. Looking back on it twenty five years later, it remains one of his last truly great movies. Everyone brings it for this movie. Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgård, Sean Bean, it’s a regular who’s who for “tough guy” casts.

John Frankenheimer’s career has been all over the place during the decades he’s been an active director. He’s so damned prolific, he can put out a great movie followed by a stinker and followed up by a great movie again, he moves so quickly he can’t stop to be worried about his successes or his failures. With Ronin, he appears to be firing on all cylinders. Just about everything works. Even the lack of story, the thinnest of plots, seems to work in its favor. It’s not a movie that’s interested in superfluous details that enrich the story. It’s interested in the meat and potatoes and focuses its energy on that almost exclusively. Sure, there are some deviations from the main story where we find out that there are other dangerous men involved, and some silly espionage type stuff, but it’s only so that it can set the stage for an explosive climax.

It seems mandatory for a movie like this to be set in Europe. The car chases just wouldn’t work in a congested Los Angeles or New York. Movies like Munich or many of the Mission: Impossible movies need to have those old, cobbled streets—the cities need to look as classic as the cars, and the cars as cool as the leads.

Ronin is a classic go-to “dude flick” like Predator, where the main cast is predominantly a sausage fest, although there is generally a woman in the main cast, who can hold her own—in this case, Natascha McElhone, who does a great job, is tough as nails, and gets shit done professionally. She has little time for mind games. She wants what she wants, and she can ram a car speeding up a freeway ramp in the wrong direction, or fire a gun out a window with the best of them.

The only reason all of this works is because everyone involved is so confident in how well it will work. If the tone of the movie, which is that of deadly seriousness, had been compromised, or unsure, it wouldn’t have been half as successful as it. For a movie of this caliber, in this genre, to pull off successfully being badass, it needs to almost coast by on its charms. It needs to almost be saying to its audience, “Yeah, I know I’m cool. So what? Beat it, kid!”

It would be hard to imagine a movie successfully pulling off this level of badassedry today. How movies are made have changed so drastically, I can’t visualize a modern movie having the same level of cool, while our getaway drivers and heist-men speed away in cars with a CGI background, backlit with that artificial glowing light you see so prevalent in superhero pictures. You need the real cars. You need the real locations. And you need to pull off the impossible task of having a movie that seems to be above it all, while giving its absolute all for the sake of pure entertainment. It’s the ultimate paradox and necessary formula to this kind of picture.

At just about two hours in length, Ronin is just the right length. It’s a brisk two hours that are constantly moving, but we have those built-in, quieter moments where the filmmakers get to show off that they hired David Mamet to punch up the script, and they go on long monologues about their criminal work ethic. We listen and we watch and we almost don’t mind that the movie took a break from the action we were there to see.