John Frankenheimer’s thriller makes skilled people doing dangerous work a pleasure to watch. The characters are underwritten, but Robert De Niro, Jean Reno and the car chases earn a firm recommendation for action enthusiasts.
Ronin is a good thriller with excellent car chases and a script that does not quite earn the attention it demands. John Frankenheimer keeps us interested by taking the work seriously: these people have a job to do, and we want to see how they do it. Their suspicious dealings are enjoyable even when the reasons for them become slippery. We recommend it for that professional concentration, with fair warning that the script leaves most of its people underwritten.
Robert De Niro, as Sam, gives the film the steadiness it needs whenever the plotting threatens to wander. He makes guardedness watchable, and Jean Reno’s Vincent is persuasive company because neither actor seems desperate to make an impression. Their scenes give us the welcome impression that someone here knows what he is doing. The rest of the ensemble is less well served, with Natascha McElhone’s Deirdre and Stellan Skarsgård’s Gregor caught in writing that values uncertain loyalties above individual character.
The car chases justify that patience. Robert Fraisse’s cinematography makes the driving feel dangerously physical, and Antony Gibbs’s editing sustains the pressure without reducing every burst of speed to a blur. We tensed up watching the cars, because their movement has weight and the danger seems close enough to hurt. Frankenheimer lets us attend to the driving itself, which is a considerable pleasure in an action film: we are watching people handle machinery under pressure, and the skill is legible.
Michael Z. Hanan’s production design helps by keeping the surroundings credible enough for that danger to register. Paris is not simply somewhere attractive to put the cast; the film encourages us to consider what it takes to move through a place at speed. The locations feel suited to people concentrating on the next practical problem, and that restraint works. The music credited to Elia Cmiral and Djivan Gasparyan lends the proceedings some unease, although it cannot supply the personal stakes the writing withholds.
The screenplay by David Mamet and J. D. Zeik is the obstacle to a warmer recommendation. It keeps loyalties uncertain, but uncertainty about who can be trusted is more rewarding when we have something solid to hold on to elsewhere. Here the story sometimes becomes difficult to follow without giving us enough reason to care about untangling it. The actors keep those passages tolerable, yet their assurance cannot disguise how little room they have to suggest lives beyond the job.
The consensus is cooler than we are, and the complaints about muddled storytelling and underwritten people are fair. We disagree that these faults cancel out the pleasure of watching skilled actors in action staged with such care. For a thriller about professionals, Ronin spends surprisingly little time making us feel what this work costs them. It gets enough out of their immediate difficulties to keep us interested without that deeper attachment.
At 122 minutes, it could lose some complication without losing much that matters. The chases are worth waiting for, and the cast gives the waiting some dignity. Choose it for the driving, and resist the temptation to treat the plot as homework.
