From Paris With Love (2010)

Release Date: 5 February 2010 (USA)

Size: 689.37 mb

Genre: Action, Crime, Thriller

Tag line: Two agents. One city. No merci.

Subtitles: None

IMDB Rating: 6.4/10 (17074 votes)

Directed By: Pierre Morel

Movie Review: "From Paris With Love"


What a shame that From Paris with Love decides halfway through that it wants you to take it seriously. Because you can't. Not at all. And if director Pierre Morel took a cue from his star, John Travolta, and went strictly for the ridiculous, this could have been fun.

Look at it this way: The title is tongue-in-cheek, Travolta is as unbridled as he's ever been (which usually doesn't serve him well), and there's not much of a story going on. So why not play to the limited strengths the film has? Better to be a good bad movie than a bad bad movie, after all.

There are simply too many regrettable habits in From Paris with Love that the film shouldn't have even bothered trying to fix them. It begins with the dialogue and extends to what little character development that shows up, and when those two things are afflicted, there's pretty much no hope for anything else.

So Travolta does the smart thing: Distract the audience with such a laughable character that the crowd doesn't notice what's really going on. It's like very loud, irritating sleight of hand. Why the film takes a turn for the consequential is just beyond me.

Travolta plays a CIA agent named Wax. Naturally, he's the best at his job. How absurd is that? I wouldn't let a guy like that wash my windows, much less work intel for our government overseas. Wax punctuates his conversations with pop culture references, though I suspect that's mostly unconscious as far as the character's concerned. I do wish Travolta had overruled the filmmakers to exclude a tip of the hat to his "Royale with Cheese" speech from Pulp Fiction, but otherwise, it's not a bad affection.

Wax is kinda sorta partnered with James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a diplomat and low-level CIA flunkie. Reece is a desk jockey but wants one of those assignments you see in bad John Travolta movies, so he tags along as Wax tries to thwart a terrorist plot in the City of Light. This sort of device isn't new. The rogue cop and the buttoned-down cop go together like peanut butter and chocolate, and maybe that's the problem.

Because there's such a tried-and-true movie archetype working here, From Paris with Love may gravitate toward a more Lethal Weapon- style approach as the action intensifies. So would it have worked better with different characters? I don't know. Neither Travolta nor Meyers stinks up the joint, but they don't get much support from the rest of the film, which doesn't keep anything around long enough to be truly consistent with any of them.

Reece has a love interest, but you get the sense it's only so there's a female character in here somewhere. The terrorist angle materializes only to the extent that it provides a decent excuse to stage shootouts and chases in Paris, but it barely holds water on its own. And again, if Morel wasn't trying to make it hold water, it would be easier to forgive.