Ronin
Ronin is a 1998 action-thriller film written by J.D. Zeik and David Mamet and directed by John Frankenheimer. It stars Robert De Niro and Jean Reno as two of several former special forces and intelligence agents who team up to steal a mysterious, heavily guarded suitcase while navigating a maze of shifting loyalties and alliances. The film is noted for its sensational car chases.
Plot
In a Paris café, an Irish woman named Deirdre (Natascha McElhone) meets five men, taking them to a warehouse and briefing them on a mission. The men, Spence (Sean Bean), Larry (Skipp Sudduth), Gregor (Stellan Skarsgård), Vincent (Jean Reno) and Sam (Robert De Niro), are all former special forces soldiers or intelligence operatives now working as mercenaries. Sam is most likely portraying a paramilitary officer from the CIA’s elite Special Activities Division. Deirdre orders the team to attack a heavily-armed convoy and steal a suitcase, though does not reveal its contents. Following the briefing, the team begins assembling their equipment. Deirdre meets with her handler Seamus (Jonathan Pryce), who reveals that Russian gangsters are bidding for the case and that the team must act quickly to intercept it. Later at the warehouse, Spence is exposed as a fraud and is summarily released from the team, who then depart for Nice, where for the next several days they observe the convoy and plan an ambush. The team engages the convoy and pursue the survivors through the surrounding highways in the country. After a lengthy car chase and gun battle, they successfully obtain the case, but Gregor betrays the team and steals the case for himself before disappearing, leaving a fake case that explodes, seriously injuring Larry.
Gregor attempts to sell the case to the Russians but shoots his contact when he attempts betrayal. Gregor contacts Mikhi, the leader of the gangsters and threatens to sell the case to the Irish unless Mikhi pays a grossly inflated price for it, which Mikhi agrees to. Meanwhile, the rest of the team track Gregor through one of Sam’s old CIA contacts and corner him in the Roman arena in Arles. Following a tense standoff and hectic gunfight with Gregor and the Russians negotiating with him, Gregor escapes the coliseum but is kidnapped by Seamus, who kills Larry and escapes with Deirdre just as Sam and Vincent emerge from the coliseum. Sam, seriously wounded from the fight, is taken by Vincent to his friend Jean-Pierre (Michael Lonsdale) in a villa in rural France. After removing the bullet and allowing Sam time to recuperate, Vincent asks Jean-Pierre to help him locate Gregor, Deirdre and Seamus. Meanwhile, in a Paris slum, Seamus learns that Gregor has mailed the case to himself at a post office in Paris. Later, as they retrieve the case, they are ambushed by Vincent and Sam. Following a high-speed chase through the streets and tunnels of Paris, Vincent shoots out Deirdre’s tires and sends her car over a highway overpass. The three are pulled from the car by construction workers shortly before it explodes, and Gregor once again escapes with the case.
Vincent and Sam, considering their options, discover that the case is identical to one used by figure skaters. Intelligence gleaned from Jean-Pierre’s contacts also suggest the Russians are involved with figure skater Natacha Kirilova (Katarina Witt), the protégé of Mikhi, who is performing a show at the local arena that night. Vincent and Sam appear at the arena as Mikhi, already there with Natacha, receives a call from Gregor, who demands to meet in a backstage dressing room. At the meet, Mikhi exchanges money for the case when Gregor, prepared to leave, reveals that he has positioned a sniper somewhere in the arena that will shoot Natacha if Gregor is betrayed. Mikhi shoots Gregor regardless, allowing Natacha to be killed, and Mikhi prepares to leave with the case and his money. Meanwhile, Vincent and Sam follow the panicked crowd out of the arena in time to see Seamus ambush and shoot Mikhi before stealing the case. Sam runs ahead of Seamus and finds Deirdre sitting in the getaway car, where he asks her to leave the scene, revealing himself as an agent of the CIA currently pursuing Seamus. Deirdre flees, leaving Seamus to shoot his way past Vincent and escape through the crowd back to the arena with Sam in pursuit. In the final gunfight, Seamus wounds Sam and prepares to kill him when Vincent opens fire from the scaffolding, killing Seamus before collapsing due to his own wounds.
Some time later radio broadcasts reveal a peace agreement has been reached between Sinn Féin and the British as a result of Seamus’s death. Sam and Vincent share a drink in the same Montmartre café from the first scene and part as friends before Sam drives off with his CIA contact, Vincent disappears up a nearby staircase into gloomy Paris.
The contents of the metal case are never revealed (see MacGuffin). Mamet has written that he believes revealing such details can be anticlimactic, that a director is wiser to allow the audience’s imagination to answer the question. This is a technique Mamet has used repeatedly in his films. In fact, in earlier versions of the script, the briefcase is destroyed at the climax. Sam observes that only the top men in the Russian mob and the IRA, plus a handful of men in the CIA knew what was in the case. In the DVD’s director’s commentary, Frankenheimer says that in the film, Seamus is the only person who actually needs to know what the case contains. As an aside, on the film’s web site when Ronin was in theatres, the public could suggest and vote for what they thought could be in the case. One of the popular suggestions was ‘Guinness.’
