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 John Travolta co-stars in the action thriller From Paris With Love. |
It’s a rare movie that starts bad and gets better, but From Paris With Love is just that film. It’s a spy story with a weak start and a better action finish.
Not much better, but still ...
Jonathan Rhys Meyers stars as James Reece, a wannabe special agent working in Paris at the U.S. embassy. He gets the odd espionage job to do, but it’s all small potatoes. He’s hoping to one day have special-ops status.
Reece has a beautiful French girlfriend; he’s about to get a loose cannon of a partner. This first act of From Paris With Love is played for laughs, and it’s really clumsy.
Enter John Travolta. Bald and belligerent as Charlie Wax, he’s the wild card Reece draws for a work assignment, and it might all be Reece’s chance at the big leagues. Wax is a loud, crude, brash American agent who shoots first and doesn’t ask questions at all. He muscles his way across Paris, blasting up entire restaurants in his search for a drug lord, with poor Reece trailing along behind him, protesting.
The movie still plays a lot of scenes for laughs — there’s a huge shoot-’em-up in which body after body falls down a staircase in front of a horrified Reece — but the stakes are higher and the laughs are much darker. You’ll enjoy seeing a middle-aged Travolta take on a gang of street toughs and beat every one of them to a bloody pulp.
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Well, you might.
What’s less enjoyable is the lack of screen chemistry between Rhys Meyers and Travolta. The latter steamrolls through every scene, with the former behaving as if his part were an afterthought. They do not mesh well.
Never mind. By the time Reece finds out that terrorists are the target and he’ll actually have to use his gun, the body count is huge and the action is getting frantic. From Paris With Love is never gripping, but there are scenes in the grand finale that are fairly exhilarating.
Sadly, From Paris With Love is the sort of movie that wants to riff twice on Travolta’s cinema past as an inside joke. The story is filmmaker Luc Besson’s baby (with a screenplay by Adi Hasak), and the director, Pierre Morel, is here exploring a lot of the same turf he covered in Taken, with Liam Neeson.
What From Paris With Love has to offer is a distraction from winter and an alternative to Avatar. There are worse things.
(This film is rated 14A)