Review of From Paris with Love

             I initially started this film as a throwaway to watch while I ate dinner, but as I quickly found out the movie is a very fun and straightforward action film.  From Paris with Love, which stars a boring and cheesy Jonathan Rhys Myers and crazy as ever John Travolta, both working for an unnamed spy group that keeps America safe, is from the school of action movies where the plot is an afterthought.  All one needs to know about the narrative complexities of the movie is summed up when Travolta explains to Meyers what he is doing by basically saying, “you wanna know what all this shit is about? its about killing fucking TERRORISTS.  Yes, terrorists; here in Paris.”
            For the most part, the film plays like your typical buddy-cop movie with Travolta being the Riggs of the group and Meyers the Murtaugh without any of the “I’m getting too old for this shit” charm.  Meyers seems to be trying to get into the spirit of the movie, but he simply can’t compete with Travolta’s scenery chewing and relish to play a bad-ass.  

So here we have movie that is unconcerned with plot and chemistry between characters; so then what is it concerned about?  Showing us how good John Travolta’s character is at killing people while Rhys Meyers stares in amazement while holding a very important two foot tall vase filled with cocaine--yes, that is actually in the movie, I’d almost be willing to venture out and say that that is the case of most of the movie.  What we have here is a film that strictly works off of terrific action scenes, and I’m not talking about those types action scenes that involve bullet time and cameras spinning 360 degrees.  These are good old fashioned sequences that involve guns, bazookas, speeding cars, and actually blowing stuff up.  

More than anything though I liked this film because it reminded me of action movies I watched growing up where you knew that the hero would not die and each scene somehow managed to top the previous one in terms of action and creativity in dispatching bad guys.  Whether or not director Pierre Morel intended this is unclear, but I’m willing to overlook heavy handed self-reference, a horribly cheesy ending, and a subplot about love and forgiveness to say that at least his intentions were in the right place.