The Professional

The Professional (Le Professionnel, 1981) is a French action thriller you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Georges Lautner and built entirely around Jean-Paul Belmondo. He plays Josselin Beaumont, a secret service agent betrayed by his own government in the middle of a job.

Beaumont was sent to kill the dictator of a small African republic. Then Paris changed its mind, and rather than recall him, the higher-ups quietly fed him to enemy authorities. He survives prison, breaks out, and walks back into France with one plan: finish the contract on his own terms, exactly when that same leader arrives on a state visit. Half the intelligence apparatus and a cold-eyed commissioner played by Robert Hossein are hunting him down.

What lifts this above standard spy fare is Belmondo himself, doing his own stunts and turning Beaumont into a charming fatalist who keeps smiling as the walls close in. The closing scene, set to Ennio Morricone's haunting "Chi Mai," became one of the most quoted endings in French cinema. Stream The Professional (1981) online on iFILM.