Mona Lisa (1986)
Directed by Neil Jordan
George is a small-time crook just out of prison who discovers his tough-guy image is out of date. Reduced to working as a minder/driver for high class call girl Simone, he has to agree when she asks him to find a young colleague from her King's Cross days. That's when George's troubles just start.
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What critics compared Mona Lisa to
And if nothing else, you can spend its running time recalling better movies it seems to pay tribute to — Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Mona Lisa, The Professional, Oldboy, Drive.
At its best, You Were Never Really Here reminded me of one of the most underrated films of the 1980s, Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa—only without peak Bob Hoskins or Michael Caine or anything more than the rudiments of a plot.
Among its many resonances, Drive reminded me of Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa, another tale of a driver teetering between innocence and cruelty; of Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West, with their nameless, laconic protagonists and meticulous buildups to spasms of sudden violence; of the original 1971 Get Carter and its intoxicating pitilessness; of Halloween in its use of—well, you'll see.
At one point, the two are shown sitting on a bench in front of Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa,” as Napoleon exclaims, “It is me!”
That’s because Winstead’s performance–never laughing and delivering a smile like the “Mona Lisa”–is akin to Zooey Deschanel’s character in just about anything she’s done but especially in “(500) Days of Summer.”
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They hunt a precious device whose whereabouts are hidden in a world-famous item (the "Mona Lisa" instead of the Declaration of Independence).
His work as Johnny is, to my eyes, the finest acting done by any Brit of his generation, the greatest single performance in a British movie in the two decades since Bob Hoskin's epochal turn in Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa .