REVIEW: From Paris With Love

IF  THIS IS LOVE...

Maybe John Travolta just got tired of playing nice guys most of the time, and trying to retain his old sex symbol image.  But was the alternative Charlie Wax (who thought of such a creepy name?)—an overweight, bald, goateed American CIA agent, who spots lines like “Wax on Wax off” and calls his bulky weapon Mrs Jones. Funny? Ewww is more like it!

In Pierre Morel’s From Paris With Love,  Americans and Asian baddies rum amuck in the beautiful city, with hardly any stops to admire the scenery.

The film is meant to be a buddy action movie, that has a long tradition in Hollywood, but this CGI-ridden bore is not the best example of the genre. It is one of the conventions of the genre, however, that if one partner is macho and obnoxious, the other has to be the opposite. So James Reese (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a bland, chess-playing, Cambridge-educated aide to the US ambassador and also a low-level CIA operative, yearning for a more challenging assignment than planting bugs. He has a pretty girlfriend, Caroline (Kasia Smutniak), the token female; what’s Paris without a little romance?

Wax and Reese have to destroy a Chinese drug ring, but there’s a big terrorist plot out there too.  There is the usual intrigue and double cross, and lots of action, which is so repetitive that you could sleep through it all and not miss a thing.

Even taken into consideration the fact that this is a formula film, some of these routine actioners can be amusing or entertaining or both—like the Rush Hour series.  But that needs a lot of energy from the actors and, definitely a chemistry between the two leading men. Travolta and Rhys-Meyers look like they don’t even want to be in the same room together, leave aside sharing adventurous episodes. Still, the predictable film seems to be awe of Travolta occasional badass persona.  For instance, his favorite dish is a Royale with Cheese. Now where did you hear that before?  (Ans: Pulp Fiction)

Don’t even look for logic or ask why Wax merrily guns down Chinese (How many more of them you think there are?”) and “Ragheads”.  He is supposed to be racist and sexist and you are supposed to find that funny. In any case, Paris is not the place for the noisy, trigger-happy American agents, that city of delights should be left to an aesthete like James Bond.