From Paris With Love

Is there a guy on earth that doesn't get a kick out of action movies? I mean they're fun and have lots of cool things like explosions and car chases and other manly things. However I must admit that this particular genre has fallen into the trap of, well, sucking pretty hard in the last few years with only a few gems like “Live Free or Die Hard” and some of the Marvel adaptations being reminders of why this genre is popular in the first place, especially if they are actually trying to have a coherent story. Yes, it seems that I have to put on my movie geek hat and say that more is being done in foreign venues than here in the states, but I can’t help what’s true. It’s partially why I’ve been fond of French made action films, since usually they have more interesting locations, better style, interesting action and fun characters. Though, there are exceptions to that particular idea.
And so we come to “From Paris with Love”, a buddy action film from the French film makers that gave us “Taken”, which despite a couple plot holes that were fairly glaring, I felt was fairly well crafted for a good little action/revenge flick, and though I had little knowledge of “with Love” before I saw it, I was at least hoping for something entertaining, if not entirely good. Did I get what I asked for? No.
To be fair the film has one redeeming factor to it, and that’s John Travolta playing the main bad ass of the movie Charlie Wax. He is so delightfully quirky and over the top in his part that it was the only thing that made me keep watching the rest of the flick to see what he’d do next. He was cool and methodical, but could have his berserk-er moments of flat out ass kicking and there’s even a bit of fan service in the form of a Royale with cheese he munches on at one point. Too bad all the other performances suck the big one. Jonathan Rhys Meyer’s character was very forgettable even though I have to admit he is able to get the job done by playing a good straight man type trying to cope with Travolta’s volatile nature, I still found him bland and uninteresting.
That was another thing that kind of put me off, most buddy films, especially buddy action flicks like this, rely on pretty precise chemistry between the two actors. It's a give and take thing because, when it comes down to it, there's one by the books neat and tidy type, and then there's the lose cannon with poor hygiene, they hate each other at first but something has to keep them together and then they grow to be a powerhouse team, but you have to have the reason they stay together make sense. While Travolta and Meyers play fairly well off each other, there is enough of a lack to break any connection the characters may have, and the audience is left wondering why Meyers wants to continue to put up with Travolta’s behavior much longer than the first couple of scenes, the only reason we get is that he wants to be an agent and this is the only thing he can do to achieve that... So you're telling me the NSA makes all people that want to be agents deal with a crazy bald guy that's trying to kick some serious terrorist ass, while basically putting your life in danger because he needs a guy to basically be used as bait? Seems like it's be easier to just keep being the nerdy ambassador's aide!
I haven’t even started on the stupidly vague and changing plot. At first it’s mentioned that Travolta, an NSA agent, is there to bring down a huge drug cartel. Ok, this is good action movie fodder, many others have had a lot of success with this concept. Then out of nowhere he tells Meyers that it was never about the drugs, despite the fact he is very adamant that it’s drugs for about 10 minutes of the movie, and it’s suddenly all about stopping a terrorist attack. This is still a good action plot, but it’s undermined by the fact that they already had another cliché that was being set up already and then threw it out with a vague line to relate them in that the terrorists are being funded by the drugs... It still hurts my brain to try and figure out a better way to say that.
I digress, when it comes to an action movie, it’s all about the action sequences, are they good, or bad? Here, the answer is bad. There’s way too much shaky camera work, the editing is choppy and they use slow motion shots to cover up the fact that Travolta can’t really do hardcore fight choreography anymore, which was upsetting because I felt his fight with Christian Slater in “Broken Arrow” was one of the best of the ‘90s and seeing him turned into someone that needs slow motion to beat people up, it was depressing to say the least. The only good sequence is in the end of the film where there is a pretty well done car chase, but it’s most definitely too little too late. I was just so unenthusiastic with these sequences that I found myself looking at my watch to see how much longer I had to sit through this monotonous pile of shit.
Overall, this is an action film that really just tries way, way too hard to be a drama. Something like that can work in a film like “Taken”, where the motivation is more personal. Here, they try and put in a very bad twist to make it more dramatic, but overall, the action is dull, the characters don’t really work together, the plot does more 180’s than I think is appropriate and it all boils down to a fairly mediocre experience that I wouldn’t even recommend as a rental.