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- Movie: From Paris With Love
- Rating: R
- Starring: John Travolta, Jonathon Rhys Meyers, Kasia Smutniak, Amber Rose Revah, Yin Bing and Richard Durden
- Written By: Adi Hasakl
- Directed By: Pierre Morel
- Distributor: Lionsgate
- Series:
From Paris With Love Review
No Merci By
Rob Vaux
February 04, 2010
Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Travolta in Pierre Morel's action film FROM PARIS WITH LOVE(2010).
© Lionsgate
If you don't mind being ashamed of the movies you're watching, it's hard to go wrong with Luc Besson. He specializes in undeniably imaginative shoot 'em ups, girded by appalling social subtext but so gosh-darned fun that the better angels of our nature usually find other things to do while we're watching. So it is with From Paris With Love, produced by Besson and directed by his protégé Pierre Morel who previously helmed the better (though no less gratuitous) Taken.
This film uses a similar structure as that earlier piece, but with even more simplistic results. It starts with a State Department official in Paris named James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Besides advising the ambassador and frolicking with his French lover (Kasia Smutniak), he moonlights for the CIA, doing low-level grunt work like swapping out license plates and planting bugs in high level offices. He longs for something more, however: kicking ass and taking names in true black bag fashion. There's a saying which warns against that, of course, and soon enough, he gets exactly what he wishes for… courtesy of hard-core assassin Charlie Wax (John Travolta) who arrives hoping add a few more enemy combatants to his trophy wall.
Wax comes across like most Travolta villains: manic, motor-mouthed and given to impulsive displays of violence. The catch? This time he's on the side of the angels… though don't tell that to the hordes of faceless mooks he blows away. With Reece as his reluctant Sancho Panza, he cuts a swath of bloody destruction through the Paris underworld, ostensibly in search of drug-dealing terrorists, but really to provide us with the visceral satisfaction of watching horrible people die in creative ways.
As long as you accept the movie strictly on that level, it makes for a marvelous good time. Morel has a knack for tricking out the details of each scenario--showing us why a given character is a bad-ass, not just letting him wreak mindless havoc. Wax displays intelligence, creativity and an ability to think on the fly, augmented by Travolta's usual over-the-top energy (which thankfully doesn't eclipse the character's other traits). Meyers' straight-man routine works well amid all the chaos, which From Paris With Love delivers with a high amount of professionalism. Like all of Besson's oeuvre, it takes sadistic glee in dishing out all the pain and mayhem, but you'd have to be made of stone not to grin just a little when the bullets start flying.
Problems arise when you dig beyond the surface details into what we'll laughingly refer to as subtext. The villains embody nasty stereotypes--swarthy Arabs all happy to die for Allah--while women serve as either obstacles or outright dangers to the two men's mission. From Paris With Love trundles them out with the same eye for detail as Wax's shooting-gallery tactics, attempting to infuse the proceedings with authenticity even as they veer into cartoonish exaggeration. The two leads suffer from shaky motives as well, brushing off colossal betrayals with a shrug and shooting long-time friends in the same casual manner as they might order a beer.
For films of this ilk, that doesn't matter a huge amount. Those coming for a poly sci treatise have definitely wandered into the wrong theater, and the thrills wouldn't be quite as down and dirty without a slightly unpleasant tang in the mix. If you're adept at holding your nose and understand that nothing on screen comes close to what most of us understand to be reality, it's quite a hoot. They don't call them "guilty pleasures" for nothing, and From Paris With Love practically bursts at the seams with them. Just don't let them scuttle beyond the theater walls. They have no place out there, no matter how hard the film tries to convince us otherwise.
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The trailer with that stupid background music didn't help my desire to want to see this but I bet its going to be a non stop action movie. If I catch it or not its not the end of the world but looks like a rental at this time...and if I don't see it at the rental I doubt I'll lose any sleep over it.