There was never anything subtle about Luc Besson’s “Leon: The Professional,” titled “Leon” overseas but “The Professional” here, and retitled both as it arrived on video.

A minimalist thriller with maximalist, pull out the stops exess, it’s an opera of violence with performances both understated and bombastic enough to blow the speakers out in the theater.

It’s the film that launched Besson in this hemisphere and set Jean Reno firmly on the path to action stardom. It was the screen debut of future Oscar winner Natalie Portman. And it was the last movie the great Gary Oldman made during his drug binge years, and it shows. He sobered-up from authentically “bleary” and went on to win an Oscar himself.

“Death is…whimsical, today.”

But Oldman’s diva turn as a volcanic, classical music-loving addict, a murderously corrupt D.E.A. agent, isn’t the only thing about this Little Italy epic that’s out of control. This picture is bracing and moving, flippant and cutesy, even.

Oh, and unsettling to the point of disturbing, borderline repellent. That’s just what’s on the screen, not even taking into account the accusations that hit Besson when #MeToo crossed the Atlantic that seem to fold onto the pervy tightrope this picture walks.

The story is a “Gloria” variation about a child taken in after her family is slaughtered by gangster law enforcement agents. She is protected from the mortal threat that comes with being a witness to mass murder. Here, the protector is a “cleaner,” a variation on a hitman character Reno played in “La Femme Nikita.”

Leon is simple, illiterate and all-business. But when the 12 year-old neighbor girl he’s noticed smoking, sporting a black eye and a foul mouth knocks on his door when she realizes four men have just murdered her father, stepmother, half sister and younger half-brother, the always-relocating killer-for-hire lets her in.

It’s the “relationship” that adds an edge beyond edgy and gives “Leon” a heaping helping of cringe. Look at the way Besson has Mathilda dressed — short-shorts, leggings, midriff-baring tops. Jodie Foster in “Taxi Driver” comes to mind, sexualized costuming for a child obsessed with the “Transformers” cartoons.

With Leon being a tad simple, we’re allowed to ponder this connection, which isn’t quite fatherly and yet never crosses any finite line in a romantic regard. But damn, it comes close.

When Mathilda convinces her protector to play a dress-up game of “Who is she, now?” it’s damned creepy, but kind of apt that she trots out as Madonna in bra-baring “Material Girl” mode. But then, bizarely, she is “Seven Year Itch” subway grate “Happy birthday, Mister President” Marilyn Monroe.

Every parent in the audience must have squirmed at that. Did Portman’s?

I went to New York in ’94 to review and interview the stars of this film and Atom Egoyan’s middle-aged men trooping to a slutty schoolgirl-uniformed exotic dance club — “Exotica” –which previewed the same weekend. Between barely-beyond-a-tween Portman and “Exotica” teen Mia Kirshner one could get a seriously jaded take on stage parents, even though Portman’s escorted her to her interviews.

But the best argument against seeing this film through a narrow, creeper-behind-the-camera lens is the bravura movie-making that just bowls you over even as you fret about what lines Monsieur Luc might cross.

Heroes and villains are framed in tight, sweaty close-ups, action beats perfectly-assembled, characters built out of on-the-nose casting (Danny Aiello as Leon’s Italian restaurant “contractor” and banker) right down to Oldman. Who better to play an cultured, psychotic addict, someone whose every swallowed pill is an orgasmic experience,than an actual addict?

Besson limits how much of the city we see, concentrating on the old, iron-railing’d New York flophouse, the worn-out apartment and Leon’s spartan lifestyle.

The contract killer wears Windsor-rimmed sunglasses, even when he’s sleeping — upright, pistol-at-hand, in the comfiest chair in any hotel room or apartment he rents. His outdoor uniform is a stocking cap and trench coat which covers his leather weapons harness/vest.

He is a loner with only an ancient leather suitcase that carries his arsenal and a few clothes, a violin case and a houseplant, “My only friend…always happy.”

Mathilda weeps for her kid brother, not her abusive father, his latest wife or her jazzercise-obsessed half-sister. And when Leon bluntly tells her his line of work, she wants to know his price, and hearing that, if he can teach her to “clean.”

The film’s light treatment of this is seriously twisted, too. He teaches her his rules — “No women, no kids” — borrowed from the hitman thrillers of John Woo. He explains the levels of expertise killers-for-hire acquire. Sniping from afar, at first, with “the knife” being the close quarters weapon you master last, after you’ve grown hardened to murdering.

The training is chilling, but cute.

Mathilda wants to execute the men who killed her little brother. Leon doesn’t discourage this and goes as far to offer her a pistol. That lack of boundaries and push-back will bring the full weight of New York law enforcement down on them.

What sticks with you about the film is that first “hit,” an epic one-man assault on a territory-violating heavy surrounded by body guards.

“Somebody’s coming up. Somebody serious.”

Eric Serra’s score, romantically orchestral if a tad nervy, adds sleigh bells when violence is coming. That’s been copied in many a thriller score since.

Leon comes at his victims from above, and below, one at a time and then in a group. Bullets perforate the metal shutters to the mobster’s rental. We can guess what happened to the mugs on the balcony when the blinds were dropped, blocking our view.

“Leon” is a film that whips the viewer around, snaps us back in our seats and makes us cringe at the adorable business of teaching a child to “clean” and the relationship rendered inappropriate simply by virtue of Leon’s childishness and Mathilda’s immitations of maturity.

Besson launched the “Transporter” series, dabbled in sci-ci (“The Fifth Element”), and produced, wrote and/or directed films like “Lucy” and “Anna.” Very young, very skinny and girlish women have been a regular feature of his thrillers, either as objects of desire to be “transported” or petite young things who kill.

He even gave his then-much-younger wife Milla Jovovich her own epic, “The Messenger.”

Whatever eyebrows his “tendencies” used to raise were once dismissed as “That’s guys in the movie biz for you” and “Well, he’s FRENCH.” Now, post-Weinstein, not so much.

But in a way, that transgressive edge adds to the disquiet of “The Professional,” a movie that would be all flashy technique and Oldman without Mathilda, Portman and Reno’s “Leon” struggling to figure out what to do with her and how to take her.

For my money, it’s every bit the classic that its contemporary thriller, Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” is thought to be, a film that engages, thrills and repels in equal measure.

Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity, a child smoking, innuendo

Cast: Jean Reno, Natalie Portman, Danny Aiello and Gary Oldman.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Luc Besson. A Columbia Pictures release on Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, etc.

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