Abstractly Expressive

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

At some point in recent years, action movies began to resemble pop versions of action painting. Their connections with traditional narrative and their concern for realistic representations of the natural world and the way human beings might plausibly behave in that world virtually vanished. Watching a Die Hard or Lethal Weapon sequel or anything by the Hong Kong action specialist John Woo, you entered a two-dimensional world in which what you mostly thought about was, as it were, the surface of the canvas--the tension and originality with which the director slapped, slathered or slashed his colors on it. Like their painterly progenitors, many of these filmmakers are craftsmen of a rare order. They know how to arrest your eye and grab your attention, purely through the sophistication and intricacy of the technique by which they orchestrate chases, explosions or mass destruction of one sort or another.

The genius of Ronin is that it slyly but quite openly acknowledges the abstract state at which the action film has arrived. The title is the Japanese word for samurai who have lost their master and must hire themselves out as amoral and dispassionate mercenaries. The script, by J.D. Zeik and Richard Weisz (a pseudonym for David Mamet), applies the term to former CIA and KGB agents who are now obliged to work for terrorists and other international thugs, with no ideology to justify their exertions. It sets a bunch of them--including Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgard and Natascha McElhone, all enigmatic and excellent--in expensive, nonstop pursuit of an oddly shaped aluminum suitcase.

We never find out much about any of them except that their bills are being paid by Irish terrorists. We know even less about the guys they are trying to beat out of the box. Indeed--and this is the best part of the joke--neither they nor we ever discover what the box contains. It is a McGuffin raised to the level of Platonic ideal.

Unvexed by boring details, which usually just compound the implausibility of action movies anyway, we are free to appreciate the sheer stylishness of Ronin. This derives from the counterpoint between Mamet's verbal manner--weary, knowing, elliptical--and director John Frankenheimer's bold visual manner.

Frankenheimer has always liked to hold a large number of people at different depths in his frames, and that serves well the tense interplay of the actors when they're plotting and scheming. It also provides a nice contrast to the car chases that are another Frankenheimer specialty (Remember Grand Prix?). He loves sending his vehicles screeching through narrow European streets, and he apparently loves trying to top himself, because there are three such sequences here. They are done the old-fashioned way, by stunt drivers, which gives these thrill sequences an immediacy, a nervy elan that special-effects techies can't quite generate on a computer screen. They also assert the only message this film wants to convey, which is that in action movies it's not what you say but how smashingly you say it that counts.

--By Richard Schickel