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What it's about:
James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is a desk jockey at the US embassy in Paris, with a sideline in low-level secret operations for the CIA. He is soon given his first high-level assignment and partnered with a brash spy, Charlie Wax (John Travolta) to track down and eliminate a terrorist ring in the city.
What we thought:
There's a reason why this skop, skiet en donner orgy from Taken director Pierre Morel ended up being called something as meek and misleading as "From Paris With Love" – Shoot 'Em Up was already taken. And, yeah, Shoot 'Em Up (in which Clive Owen played a sharp-eyed drifter who went around shooting anything that moved) was a rather stupid film, but in full knowledge of just how camp and silly it was, making it all the more enjoyable. From Paris With Love probably reckons it shares these qualities. How else to justify having John Travolta's bald and pasty look in the film so closely resemble the evil alien lord Terl he played in the godawful Battlefield Earth?
Yes, Travolta is sure to bring on a few bouts of sniggers as the smug, trash-talking alpha dog who dresses like he's on the frontlines in Afghanistan and is one stubby cigar away from being a one-man A-Team. It's not immediately clear if we're meant to take him seriously. Every pompous word from his mouth sounds like it was cribbed from Team America: World Police, that great claymation satirical comedy from the South Park guys, and while it keeps the mood light even as he dispenses of the 89th bad guy in a hail of bullets, Travolta's Charlie Wax is pure caricature. And you can just about see Travolta's stunt stand-in working up a sweat in the star's more challenging action scenes.
As his partner, Rhys Meyers has no choice but to play the whiny wife to Travolta's gung-ho GI Joe, as they race around Paris duelling with drug lords, then local hoodlums, then big-game terrorists, with the still-green Reece becoming increasingly frustrated with Wax's shoot-now-no-questions-asked methods. Reece also has to juggle his responsibilities to his French girlfriend Caroline (played by Kasia Smutniak) who has to be kept in the dark about his new job.
Luc Besson and Adi Hasak's script has no time for subtleties or shades of grey. Every baddie who gets his head blown off is either an Arab terrorist, Asian drug dealer or African gangster. To put it bluntly, as this movie does with relish, to be non-white is to be five seconds away from death by an American bullet. It's an appallingly sinister representation of the French migrant community that seeks to put diplomacy back a decade.
From Paris With Love is the equivalent of blunt force trauma to the head. As an action movie, it's frenetic, brainless and bloody enough to keep action junkies on a high as the plot blasts its way from one extreme situation to the next. Leave your brain at home and bring a helmet instead.
