15 fantastic films that feature reluctant mentors

Luc Besson’s movie was originally called “Leon” in most of the world and “The Professional” in the United States, and now those titles have been jammed together. You may just know it as “That movie where a young Natalie Portman hangs out with an assassin.” Jean Reno is the titular hitman. He trains Portman in the ways of contract killing. Gary Oldman chews scenery. It’s weird, because it’s Luc Besson.

Mentors and protégés are central to the world of “Star Wars.” It also feels like Jedi mentors are usually not too jazzed about the whole thing. However, few have been as reluctant to do the whole mentor thing as Luke Skywalker in “The Last Jedi.” It takes Rey a while to finally convince Luke to help her hone her skills with the Force. To be fair, he did watch Kylo Ren nee Ben Solo go berserk under his tutelage.

In “Rocky,” we hear Mickey wasn’t interested in training Rocky Balboa before Rocky got his title shot, but in the film, Mickey approaches the boxer, not the other way around. “Creed” inverts that. Adonis, the son of Apollo Creed, goes to Balboa hoping to be trained, but Balboa is reluctant due to the toll boxing has taken on his body and mind. Sylvester Stallone was nominated for an Oscar for “Creed,” but did not win. Many speculate that, like Eddie Murphy, he didn’t win even though he was the favorite due to a history of not being easy to work with.

“Top Gun: Maverick” didn’t single-handedly revitalize the American movie-going experience, but it played a massive role in righting the ship from a box office perspective. Not only did it make nearly $1.5 billion worldwide, it’s also a mentor-and-protégé movie! This one kind of goes both ways at first. Tom Cruise’s Maverick is basically strong-armed into teaching at the Top Gun flight school to save his career, and at first his students are skeptical about the veteran pilot. Ultimately, they come to appreciate one another and the audience got to go home humming the “Top Gun” theme.

When you are only coaching a youth hockey team because you have to accrue community service hours due to a DUI, you probably aren’t entering the whole situation with a lot of enthusiasm. At first, onetime promising hockey player turned cynical lawyer Gordon Bombay is truly disinterested in coaching District 5, and then he’s only interested in winning at all costs. Eventually, he regains his love for hockey (and also has the best player in the league redistricted onto the newly-minted Ducks) and long story short he eventually ends up coaching at the prestigious Junior Goodwill Games in the sequel.

Maybe there’s something about aged boxing trainers not wanting to take on a new mentor. Hilary Swank plays a waitress who decides to take up boxing, but at first Clint Eastwood’s gym owner/trainer wants no part of training not just a woman, but a woman he thinks is too old to have any future in boxing. She sticks it out, though, and eventually Eastwood comes around. Then the movie becomes a dark medical drama. “Million Dollar Baby” was a massive success, though. Swank and Morgan Freeman won acting Oscars, Eastwood won Best Director, and the movie won Best Picture.

How do you justify a comedic premise of two ne’er-do-wells being tasked with serving as mentors to kids? Through community service, of course. In this R-rated, very 2008 comedy, Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott play two doofuses who join a program legally distinct from Big Brothers to serve out community service. Chaos and, if not hilarity, amusement ensues. “Role Models” is not held up as one of the quintessential 2000s comedies, but it made a splash at the time.

Some, when considering lists like this, including “Good Will Hunting,” but Robin Williams is Matt Damon’s therapist, not his mentor. Plus, Damon is more reluctant than Williams is. “Finding Forrester” is not Gus Van Sant’s direct follow-up to “Good Will Hunting,” because he made that bananas “Psycho” remake, but it is in many ways his follow-up. The movie is about a young man who manages to befriend a reclusive, J.D. Salinger-esque author played by Sean Connery. Yes, this is the “You’re the man now, dog” movie.

In all the swirling chaos of “Batman Forever,” you may not remember that this is the Batman movie that introduced Robin on the big screen. Val Kilmer was taking over as Bruce Wayne/Batman, while Chris O’Donnell, who Hollywood was hoping was going to be a star, played Dick Grayson/Robin. At least we got Dick stealing the Batmobile and trying to pick up a woman by saying, “Ju wanna take a ride in my love ma-cheen, bay-bay?” Also, at least “Batman Forever” isn’t as bad as “Batman and Robin.”

Logan, aka Wolverine, is reluctant to do just about anything that involves working with others. Usually in the films we’re talking team-ups, though. “Logan” sees the erstwhile Wolverine having fallen on hard times and being tasked with watching over Laura, a young mutant. In addition to protecting her, Wolverine becomes something of a mentor to Laura. Now, it turns out Logan is her father (after a fashion,” which is different from being a mentor, but he finds that out well down the path.

Back to the world of sports. Jimmy Dugan was a great baseball player, but he’s descended into being a problematic drinker who is utterly checked out other than the fact he’s hard up for cash. Dugan, played memorably by Tom Hanks, begrudgingly takes a job managing the Rockford Peaches, one of the new women’s baseball teams in a league that has popped up due to World War II. Early on, Dugan just spends his time drunk and asleep in the bullpen. Eventually, though, he starts actually managing, and even does some one-on-one mentoring for Dottie Hinson, the team’s best player.

Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher starring in a U.S. Coast Guard drama? That feels like a fine, forgettable mid-2000s movie, and that’s exactly what it is. Costner plays a vaunted Coast Guard rescue swimmer who has moved on to being an instructor after a tragic rescue attempt gone wrong. Kutcher is a kind of person who definitely really exists, a cocky, hotshot high school swimmer who turns down scholarships to enlist in the Coast Guard. While Costner isn’t against teaching, per se, he quickly comes to dislike Kutcher’s character and does everything he can to get the confident youngster to quit.

To be fair, if we were told that a panda voiced by Jack Black was a prophesied kung fu warrior, we’d be skeptical too. To the credit of “Kung Fu Panda,” which has spawned a super-successful franchise, Po is only identified as the Dragon Warrior due to a comical mishap. Shifu, kung fu teacher for the famed Furious Five, refuses to train Po at first, and then makes training as hard as possible on him. Of course, you can probably figure out where it all ends up.

This film is a loose adaptation of the Hercules/Heracles myth, to the extent that Disney used his Roman name but the Greek myth on top of all the musical numbers. Hercules is tasked with becoming a hero to regain his status as a god, and for that he needs to go to the satyr Phil (short for Philoctetes). Phil has been at it for a while, and has gotten quite grumpy and cynical (he’s voiced by Danny DeVito, after all). However, things end up going so well for Herc that Phil joins him on his quest.

We come full circle with a new addition to the subgenre that is also focused on a hitman. Christoph Waltz plays an aging assassin who is, yes, on the verge of retirement. He’s tasked with training a young man in the art of contract killing, but Waltz is both put off by the youngster’s personality and worried he may be part of a conspiracy aimed at killing off old assassins who know too much. The young assassin is played by Cooper Hoffman, who remains a promising actor as he works to escape the shadow of his father, the immensely-talented Philip Seymour Hoffman.