The Professional begins with a heist. It doesn’t go particularly well, and thief Alex (Olga Kurylenko) has her face revealed to potential witnesses in the mess. Alex is made to lay low while waiting for her cut of the loot, but things get pretty complicated for them. It turns out that Alex and her crew also stole a flash drive with sensitive information that a corrupt politician desperately wants to control. Mr. Washington (James Purefoy), a thug who works for said senator, goes after Alex and everyone around her, all in pursuit of the flash drive.
This film is only known as 'The Professional' locally. Elsewhere, it is known by the title 'Momentum', which is kind of funny, since this is exactly what the movie lacks. It suffers from an incoherent plot that just refuses to get going, the story burdened with extraneous details that keep it from moving forward. What should be a straightforward game of cat-and-mouse gets needlessly complicated, as the movie foolishly tries to give these happenings a sense of weight and gravity beyond what is really needed.
In the absence of good writing, an action film can get by on simplicity. Keep the plot elements simple to keep the focus on the action. The problem with this film is that it isn’t content with keeping things simple. It has a classic setup: thieves accidentally steal something of great importance to a powerful group. Said thieves end up fighting for their lives while trying to figure out what to do with the thing that they stole. This film needlessly embellishes this basic setup, burdening its main character with a sketchy background that involves the family of a colleague and all sorts of history that the writing simply cannot support.
It only gets worse as the movie gets deeper into its runtime. The movie dives headlong into a government conspiracy that it doesn’t dare flesh out, suddenly delivering scads of exposition that never gets properly addressed. This is, of course, a natural consequence of a twist structure. The film fends off revealing what’s so important about the flash drive for so long that there’s no time to really think about what it means when it is eventually revealed. The film seems to be hinting that there’s a lot more story to be told in potential sequels, but it doesn’t really deserve that chance.
The action scenes are sleekly shot but bear little personality. It looks like every other cheaply made action flick in the last decade. Fists fly and furniture breaks, but little of this film’s many sequences are memorable. Most are edited down too much to even register. Olga Kurylenko is always a striking presence, but she isn’t really the type that’s able to elevate bad material. And that’s what this film has in spades. James Purefoy fares a little better, the actor clearly relishing the chance to go hammy with a villain role. It still isn’t amazing, but Purefoy looks to be having more fun than anyone else. He’s certainly more enthused than Morgan Freeman, who clearly shows up here just to collect his paycheck.
'The Professional' is the boring kind of stupid. The film assembles an overly complicated plot to cover up the sheer emptiness of its proceedings. But the assemblage of these elements only puts the inanity into clearer focus. The writing ends up being more important to the overall effect of the picture, the words having to explain all these things that it isn’t really prepared to handle. We give action films a lot of leeway for being stupid, but 'The Professional' doesn’t deserve that consideration.
My Rating:
