Leon - The Director's Cut [Blu-ray]

Product Information

For those 4K hounds who are looking to expand their collection with a cleaned-up piece of iconic filmmaking, this new release of Leon looks nothing short of stunning. When Léon was eighteen in Italy, he fell in love with a girl from a wealthy family, but Léon's family was poor. To celebrate this landmark, Studiocanal has put together a new 4K release of the director’s cut of Leon.

At Metacritic, the film received an average score of 64 out of 100 based on 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Mathilda's abusive father attracts the ire of corrupt DEA agents, who have been paying him to stash cocaine in his apartment. It’s another memorable screen villain that goes into that elevated pantheon where characters like Trainspotting’s Begbie and Die Hard’s Hans Gruber reside. Léon: The Professional is to some extent an expansion of an idea in Besson's earlier 1990 film, La Femme Nikita (in some countries Nikita).

At the time of the accusations, Natalie Portman discussed her "complicated feelings" about the film and her associated Lolita-like sexualization as a child.

Mathilda looks up to Léon and quickly develops a crush on him, often telling him she loves him but he does not reciprocate. It’s the character of Stansfield that poses a far greater threat, the corrupt DEA agent that is responsible for the deaths of Mathilda’s family. In what is essentially an exercise—a slick urban thriller—it seems to exploit the youth of the girl without really dealing with it. It is the most electrifying performance I have seen from Gary Oldman, this edgy, wired, unpredictable sociopath.

Mathilda walks onto a field near the school to plant Léon's houseplant, as she had told Léon, to "give it roots".

Léon killed the father in revenge and fled to New York, where he met Tony and trained to become a hitman.As for the director’s cut element of this Leon release, this is the same director’s cut first seen in 2004 that adds 23 minutes of footage to the movie. I had an issue with my check disc in that the Director’s Cut drops out of sync between 85:03 and 88:22. The majority of said footage further shines the spotlight on the moments shared by Leon and Mathilda, which adds a few nice touches to the overall narrative of Leon.