Ronin (1998)

There's a moment in Ronin where Robert De Niro's character, sitting in a car about to tear through the streets of France at genuinely terrifying speed, looks utterly calm. Not action-hero calm. Not smirking-at-the-camera calm. Just the quiet, settled calm of someone who has done dangerous things for a long time and made his peace with that. It's a small moment, but it tells you everything about what kind of film John Frankenheimer has made here. This is a thriller built on people, mood, and craftsmanship rather than spectacle for its own sake, and it's all the better for it.

The setup is a familiar one: a team of mercenaries, each with their own murky past and murkier motives, assembled in Paris to retrieve a mysterious briefcase. Nobody knows what's inside it. Nobody fully trusts anyone else. The job, predictably, does not go smoothly. Spies, double-crosses, shifting loyalties, all the genre furniture is here and arranged with confidence. But as I said, the plot is not really the point. The plot is the road. The destination is almost beside the point.

Because those car chases. Good lord, those car chases. Practical, physical, shot with real precision through real streets, they remain some of the finest ever committed to film. There's no CGI safety net, no obvious trickery, just cars moving at properly alarming speeds through narrow French roads while the camera keeps up as best it can. They feel dangerous because they were dangerous. And that danger bleeds off the screen even now, decades later, which is more than you can say for most action sequences produced in the years since.

De Niro brings that quiet, weathered intensity he does so well, the kind that makes you believe every word he says without him ever having to raise his voice. It's a world away from the De Niro I found myself grimacing at in Little Fockers, which makes me appreciate performances like this one all the more. Sean Bean, meanwhile, is a delightfully twitchy wildcard, nervously charming in a way that immediately signals something is off about him. Jonathan Pryce, Stellan Skarsgård, and Natascha McElhone all add texture and intrigue without ever overstaying their welcome. It's a stacked ensemble doing exactly what a film like this needs them to do.

The dialogue does get a bit clunky in places, I won't pretend otherwise. And the final act, where allegiances shift like the wind and everyone starts making grand speeches about honour, tips into hamminess more than once. Frankenheimer doesn't quite stick the landing with the same confidence he shows everywhere else. But you forgive it, because the mood throughout is so strong and so consistent. Rainy Parisian streets. Smoky cafés. That killer French jazz score threading through the whole thing like cigarette smoke drifting across a late-night bar. The atmosphere alone carries considerable weight.

Ronin doesn't reinvent the spy thriller, and it knows it doesn't need to. What it does instead is take the bones of a familiar genre and execute them with real intelligence and real style. It's cool without being cold, grounded without being dull, and tense without resorting to cheap tricks. The world it creates, populated by professionals who've long since run out of idealism but haven't yet run out of skill, feels lived-in and credible in a way a lot of slicker, glossier thrillers simply don't manage.

For fans who like their spies world-weary, their loyalties ambiguous, and their cars very much manual, this holds up beautifully. Four stars, and I'd sit through those car chases on a loop.

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

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