Men Without A Master

What happens to the men whose craft is war when they have no more wars to fight? What do they do? They wanted to live their lives by a warrior’s code; to delight in the battle. They understood that there is something outside of themselves that need to be served. 

When that need is gone and belief has died, they suddenly find themselves in no-man’s land and they are left wondering; who and what are they now? In feudal Japan, warriors or samurai like these became wanderers and often ‘muscle for hire’. Once they were loyal to a liege; now they were men without a master, known as ‘Ronin’.  

John Frankenheimer

In the 1998 crime-thriller ‘Ronin’, Director John Frankenheimer sketches a very surreal post cold-war picture of a group of secret operatives who is now working for the highest bidder.  There was a time they were treated as their countries' most valuable assets and expected to operate at the sharp end of the stick. Now they have no more missions and have to take mercenary jobs  - the only career where their skills are still required and of use.

Old habits however die hard and with a bunch of ex-spies and military men now all working together for a man none of them know, the stage is set for every clandestine trick in the book.

Sam (Robert De Niro) is a former CIA agent and his job is to uncover who the group’s employer is, a man known to everyone only as, ‘The man in the wheelchair’. Of course, being employed by some guy in a wheelchair seems hardly fitting for this highly skilled group of individuals, and it’s safe to say they only use the term as a kind of code.

Vincent (Jean Reno) is a French Intelligence agent and along with Sam forms a really good partnership at trying to uncover who their actual employers are. While they are secretly busy trying to find their mysterious contractor, they also have to retrieve a case from some men. Who these men are, nobody knows. What the contents of the case is, no one will say, except that it must be something very important since there are both Russian Mafia and IRA members trying their utmost to get hold of it.

The opening scenes of ‘Ronin’ are brilliantly shot. There is hardly any dialogue and as viewer, you really sense the intensity that underpins covert affairs such as these.The car-chase scene in the movie is one of the longest and best ones ever captured on film and will have you on the edge of your seat.

John Frankenheimer was in complete control over all the elements of production, a style he made uniquely his own and were known for in Hollywood. When it comes to watching this movie, the cinematic flow of the story is so smooth that you get to appreciate the result of a story well told because there is only one strong leader on set. He clearly had a vision of how things should be done, and he did so seemingly effortlessly.