Luc Besson's 'The Professional' is sort of a companion piece to his international breakthrough hit 'La Femme Nikiti', and in many ways it's an even better film. It raises the stakes of Besson's playful women-with-guns theme by making the heroine a 12-year-old, played by a then unknown Natalie Portman. Jean Reno is excellent as her assassin trainer and surrogate father. Oldman is completely over the top in one of his best bad-guy roles, obsessed with both Beethoven and butchery.
As a gritty, suspenseful thriller, this film won't leave action fans feeling cheated, but the film is so much more than that. At the center of 'The Professional' is a wonderful father and daughter-like relationship between two damaged strangers who find solace in each other.
After her father and little brother are killed by her father's employers, the 12-year-old daughter of an abject drug dealer is forced to take refuge in the house of a professional murderer who by her request, teaches her the methods of his job so she can take her revenge from the corrupted DEA agent who ruined her life by killing her brother out of no actual reason.