"Besson's films are my own guilty pleasure. They break no new ground, they contain melodramatic plots, they feature vapid dialogue, and beautiful violence. And yet, unlike most action film directors whose films I might like, I will defend Besson to the death. He is the most overtly cinematic director working today; his visual language was fully developed in his first feature. In some ways, one can consider him as the French Steven Spielberg; a master of kinetics and camera movement; and big, populist entertainment who the arthouse and critics in his own country shun, while his films gross the largest boxoffice there. The difference might be that Besson has a beautifully skewed perspective on the world which becomes obvious in his authoring (something Spielberg doesn't do).

Leon is full of aquatic metaphors, only in the visuals: breath determines response, as the audience collectively breathes with Matilda learning to snipe, as she waits for Leon through his fisheye peephole to let her into his world and save her from drowning. His early life as a scuba diver has taught him to reproduce the world as a series of fluid gestures, of liquid movement and floating suspension.Furthermore, the pedophilic subtext in Leon is misconstrued; perhaps more honestly Besson presents education as dangerous, as children more aware of the adult world. Matilda needs to learn of violence and sex from an adult, but her upbringing has made her the only one who can teach Leon of the other side of life, responsibilty, feeling, empathy, and vengeance. That is far closer to the truth than the codex of violence submerged in the suburban world, which a film like The Long Kiss Goodnight presents as it's subtext.

If anything, Besson's films are the action films I've always wanted to have seen: childish fairy tales full of the violence and darkness hinted at by the adult world (which Spielberg too often sugar coats), all waiting for us to learn from them."