Quite solid stuff!

Luc Besson knows how to stage a shoot-out, but any hack with enough squibs and a camera crane can blow up an apartment hallway. What Besson has here, and what keeps this odd duck of a thriller rattling around in your head long after the brass shell casings stop clattering, is a pair of loners who make no earthly sense together.

Jean Reno plays Léon, a hitman who prefers to call himself a "cleaner." He lives on cartons of whole milk. He hangs upside down from a doorframe to do sit-ups, and his only friend is a potted Chinese evergreen (mostly because plants don't ask foolish questions). He can put a bullet through a peephole from thirty paces, but hand him a newspaper and he's completely lost. He's a lethal weapon with the emotional age of a twelve-year-old.

Enter Mathilda. Natalie Portman was barely twelve herself when she made this picture, and heaven knows where she found that fierce glare. Her family gets butchered down the hall by dirty narcotics cops. She doesn't waste tears on her deadbeat father or her screeching stepmother. She mourns only her four-year-old brother, and she wants payback. When she walks past the crime scene and raps on Léon's door, he freezes behind the peephole. He knows opening that door will blow up his quiet life. He turns the deadbolt anyway.