john frankenheimer

Ronin (1998)

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I’m a simple man. If Robert De Niro whips out a bazooka in the middle of a car chase, I’m going to cheer like I’m watching sports and my team just scored. If he whips out that bazooka a second time, I’m going to fondly remember that movie for a lifetime, like my team won a championship. There’s something crassly, meatheadedly American about the 1998 espionage thriller Ronin, despite its distinctly European setting. On an intellectual level, there’s nothing any more complex to the film’s international power struggle between The Irish and The Russians on the streets of France than there is between any two teams in a Sunday afternoon NFL game. Both sides struggle for possession of a mysterious briefcase like it’s a football, running it up and down the proverbial field in their European sports cars. The main difference between these two sports, of course, is that the combatants of Ronin are free to fire bullets & missiles at each other in order to score easy points, which is something that would likely appeal to American football audiences if it weren’t for the mess of human causalities it would leave behind.

A lot of people die in Ronin; most of them just happen to be background actors, not main characters. Even Sean Bean manages to survive the vehicular gunfire mayhem, and he’s notorious for playing characters who bite it onscreen. It’s the poor bystanders shopping at fruit stands & fish markets, playing tourist at ancient ruins, and watching innocent figure skating exhibitions who get it the worst here, gunned down while trying to enjoy the Old World backdrop the high-speed gunfights are set against. Robert De Niro stars as the only participant in those gunfights who actively diverts his aim away from those potential victims, often pausing his mission to retrieve the MacGuffin briefcase to save a couple nameless bystanders along the way. He’s characterized as a noble murderer in that way, as indicated by his titular designation as a “ronin,” a masterless samurai who has taken to mercenary work but still abides by the high-minded principles of his disciplined training. So, when he fires a bazooka at a moving car, you know it’s for a just cause, not just because he likes to watch explosions as much as the slack-jawed audience watching at home. That bazooka saves lives, in a counterintuitive way.

Already in his mid-50s by the late-90s, De Niro was starting to appear a little old & creaky for this kind of lone-hero action thriller, which asks him to show off swift warrior reflexes and make out with young ingénues between the more plausible car chase sequences. However, the creakiest aspect of the script is the hero worship that puts him in that position in the first place. Ronin starts as a Reservoir Dogs-style heist plot where several international mercenaries who do not know each other are gathered on one uneasy team, feeling each other out as they put together a plan to retrieve their target MacGuffin. An ex-CIA operative turned masterless samurai, De Niro quickly proves to be the most competent and the most principled of the bunch, humbling the rest of the crew with stock bootstrap phrases like, “You’re either part of the problem, you’re part of the solution, or you’re part of the landscape.” From then on, every single scene is staged in service of making sure we know he is the smartest, toughest, coolest, classiest, handsomest hero to ever drive down the streets of Paris & Nice, while his new partners in crime can only gaze at him in awe. He is the star quarterback, and the rest of the team is only there to make sure he looks good.

Meanwhile, the actual hero of Ronin is director John Frankenheimer, who could’ve directed a cardboard cutout of Robert De Niro to the same thrilling effect. No star quarterback can thrive without the right coach calling the plays. Despite the muted browns & greys of the film’s Old World color scheme, Frankenheimer works overtime to bring an exaggerated cartoon vibrancy to the screen. De Niro’s briefcase-heist team is introduced in cartoonish widescreen closeups in their initial meetings, often framed in exaggerated split-diopter blocking. For the car case set pieces, Frankenheimer straps the camera to the front bumper, inches above the gravel that rushes past the audience to simulate a pure rollercoaster thrill. There’s a Friedkinesque approach to car-chase mayhem here, often driving down impossibly tight alleys and against highway traffic to cause as much demolition derby damage as the budget will allow. It’s unclear to me whether Frankenheimer was hired to direct French Connection II because he had already honed the skills needed to match Friedkin’s car chase expertise or if that’s the project where he learned the craft himself. Either way, he was shooting chases as well as the best of ’em by the time he made Ronin, which really goes the extra mile with its bazooka gags.

-Brandon Ledet

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (2015)

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I don’t really remember much about John Frankenheimer’s 1996 Island of Dr. Moreau. My parents rented it the summer it came to VHS, and, presumably ignorant of how mature it was, allowed me to watch it with them (of course, my father was and is the kind of person who really only objected to profanity and sex, while violence was ignored most of the time; it’s telling that they allowed me to watch this movie, but Miss Congeniality was banned in our house years later due to Sandra Bullock’s “foul” mouth). Most of what I remember is that Fairuza Balk, who I knew from Return to Oz, was in it, as was some hideous wheezing monster named Marlon Brando, whom my mother tried unsuccessfully to convince me was once a handsome movie star. This was a movie that had hyena monsters and a horribly graphic scene of a beast person giving birth, but I don’t remember those elements at all while Brando’s white-painted face haunted me for years.

But we’re not here to talk about that movie; we’re here to talk about what that movie could have been, or, more accurately, about the documentary about the movie that could have been, had original director Richard Stanley not been fired from the project, and all the myriad ways that fate conspired to destroy his vision. In Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, director David Gregory delves into Stanley’s fascination with H.G. Wells’s novel from early childhood and his lifelong pursuit of giving the book a film adaptation that lived up to the story’s potential. Following the successes of his cyberpunk post-apocalypse horror flick Hardware and his sophomore follow up Dust Devil, Stanley found himself in talks with New Line about directing a film for them. Due to his lifelong love of Dr. Moreau, he successfully pitched the adaptation; it was all downhill from there.

Lost Soul covers a lot of ground, with interviews from sources as varied as Balk, Stanley, New Line founder and president Robert Shaye, Moreau animal behavioral consultant Peter Elliott, and actors Marco Hofschneider, Temuera Morrison, Neil Young (no, not that one), Fiona Mahl, and Rob Morrow (who took over for Val Kilmer in the Prendick role when Kilmer’s insistence on fewer shooting days meant that Kilmer was shifted into the role of Montgomery, initially filled by James Woods; Morrow would also eventually bow out and be replaced by David Thewlis). Beginning with Stanley’s upbringing as the child of a single mother who was fascinated by occultism both academically and personally and following through to Stanley’s current career (spoiler alert: it’s not pretty), the documentary details how Stanley, a young indie director whose pet project suddenly became a multi-million dollar picture when Brando expressed interest in the title role, was eventually fired from the production when he found himself in over his head and beset by problems. The literal hurricanes that destroyed many sets were nothing compared to the setback caused by Brando’s daughter’s suicide during pre-production, making it impossible to film significant portions of the film for several weeks. Worse still were the mind games that Kilmer used to undermine and belittle Stanley; the actor was going through a nasty divorce at the time, but that doesn’t begin to cover a fraction of the horror stories of intimidation tactics and threats the cast and crew recall from their time working on the film.

Stanley was ultimately fired as the result of many things that were outside of his control, and this story is a tragic one. It’s not the most engaging documentary I’ve seen, and lacks the warmth and nostalgia of, say, Best Worst Movie, which also tackled the making of a notoriously bad feature. Still, it’s a fascinating look behind the curtain of one of the biggest box office and critical flops of the 1990s, and it serves as a reminder of how an artist can be destroyed by concerns, commercial or otherwise, that are outside of his or her hands. Stanley was propelled far beyond what he was suited and prepared for too early in his career and his talent and drive weren’t enough to save him or Dr. Moreau.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond