Ronin (1998)

By the late 1990s, the action thriller had largely given itself over to digital effects and increasingly cartoonish spectacle. Ronin, released in 1998 and produced by United Artists and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer through FGM Entertainment, arrived as something of a corrective: a film with roots in classic European crime cinema, shot on location across France, and built around physical stuntwork and practical driving rather than anything conjured in post-production. The screenplay, credited to J.D. Zeik and an uncredited David Mamet (writing under the pseudonym Richard Weisz), takes its title from the Japanese term for a samurai without a master, a metaphor the film wears with a certain self-awareness. The premise is clean enough: a group of freelance operatives, each with murky intelligence backgrounds, are brought together by an Irish intermediary and tasked with recovering a heavily guarded briefcase. What is inside the case is never revealed, and the film is largely uninterested in telling you. The tension lies elsewhere.

John Frankenheimer was, by 1998, a director with a long and varied career behind him. He had made his name in the 1960s with tightly wound political thrillers, and Ronin represented something of a return to form after a difficult stretch in the preceding decades. He had a clear eye for geography and movement, and his approach to the film's set pieces, particularly the car chases through the streets of Nice and Paris, was disciplined and practical in a way that marked the film out from its contemporaries. The production leaned heavily on real driving at real speeds, with cameras mounted in and around the vehicles rather than cutting away to safer angles, and the results remain striking. For a film made on a relatively conventional studio budget, the scale of what Frankenheimer put on screen is genuinely impressive.

The ensemble Frankenheimer assembled is worth pausing on. Robert De Niro, here playing a taciturn American operative named Sam, was at a point in his career where he was moving between prestige drama and more commercial work, and Ronin sits somewhere between the two. If you have spent any time on this site you will know his range runs from the menacing, as in The Untouchables, to the genuinely comic, as in The King of Comedy, and Ronin calls on a quieter register again. Jean Reno, already well established in French action cinema by this point, brings a composed, dry presence as Vincent, the local fixer who becomes Sam's closest ally. Natascha McElhone, Stellan Skarsgård, and Skipp Sudduth fill out the team with solid, professional work, and Jonathan Pryce, though not in the top-billed cast, contributes a polished but unremarkable antagonistic presence. The film runs to 122 minutes, which gives it room to let its characters breathe without quite outstaying its welcome.

Ronin is a sleek, stylish European thriller that feels like a love letter to 90s spy cinema. It's cool, grounded, and built on tension rather than CGI. Directed by John Frankenheimer, it’s got Robert De Niro as an ex-CIA operative, Sean Bean at his most nervously charming, and a team of mercenaries chasing a mysterious briefcase across France and Spain. The plot’s solid (spies, double-crosses, shifting loyalties) but it’s not about the destination. It’s about the drive. Literally. The car chases are legendary: practical, fast, shot with real precision, and still some of the best ever put on film. The cast is stacked with character actors doing what they do best. De Niro brings that quiet, weathered intensity, Bean is a delightfully twitchy wildcard, and Jonathan Pryce, Stellan Skarsgård, and Natascha McElhone all add depth and intrigue. The dialogue’s a bit clunky at times, and yeah, it gets a little hammy, especially in the final act, where allegiances shift like the wind and everyone starts shouting about honour. But you forgive it because the mood is so strong: rainy streets, smoky cafés, that killer French jazz soundtrack. It’s not flawless, and it doesn’t reinvent the genre. But as a smart, action-packed thriller with real weight and atmosphere it holds up beautifully. Cool, confident, and built for fans who like their spies world-weary and their cars manual.

I keep coming back to Ronin every few years, and it never seems to age in the ways that matter. The action sequences hold because they were built on craft rather than convenience, and the atmosphere, grey skies, wet cobblestones, that low, bluesy score, does the heavy lifting that lesser films leave to exposition. It is the kind of thriller that trusts you to follow along without holding your hand, which feels increasingly rare. If you are working your way through 90s action and want something with a bit more grit and a bit less gloss, this is exactly where to start. Sometimes the best things in a film are the ones it refuses to explain.

Rating: ★★★★  | Year: 1998  | Watched: 2025-09-09

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Ronin (1998) on YouTube

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