From Paris With Love

From Paris with Love (2010) – on rental. Luc Besson, the award winning French film director and producer, is quite a prolific filmmaker. In the last 5 years alone, he’s been credited in an astonishing 18 films already. A lot of his output belong to the action film genre, though within the genre itself there’s been critical hits (e.g. Léon starring Jean Reno and Natalie Portman in her breakout role) and films that got royally panned by reviewers (e.g. Transporter 3).

Interestingly, a couple of his most recent action films have starred big named Hollywood actors. He produced Taken, the action film starring Liam Neeson that I five-starred last year, and this year we’ve got From Paris with Love, a super violent action-heavy starring John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

I don’t care much for Meyers after the over-acting he did in The Tudors, but Travolta is always fun to watch in roles that see him as a foul-mouth guns-a-blazing criminal/terrorist. Travolta does more of the same in this new film but as a borderline good-guy. He plays Charlie Wax, a super counter-terrorist agent who’s motto revolves around ‘smash enemy into pulp first, don’t bother with questions later’. The American agent’s sole expertise lies in violently eliminating terrorist cells.

Meyers comes in as Ambassadorial aide James Reese but who really dreams of a job with the CIA. Wax is flown into Paris where he’s met by Reese in a hilarious introduction scene involving Wax with a bunch of skeptical French customs officers. It’s scene after scene of gun battles and explosions thereafter with a wide-eyed Reese gradually waking up to the fact that being a CIA agent might mean he has to readjust his life expectancy.

Unlike Taken though, there’s no pretense of subtlety in this film and even less story to speak of. There are a couple of secondary characters, mostly oriented around Reese’s normal (boring) day job and life, though in the film’s last act, one of these characters reveals himself to be a lot more than originally seemed.

There’s a bit of cute and fun banter between the two mostly to do with Wax’s joy in partaking in extreme violence and Reese recoiling in horror each time, but the two otherwise have little ‘buddy’ chemistry. Moreover, unlike Bryan Mills (Neeson)’s motivation in engaging in violence in Taken, Wax’s only motivator is…er… that he’s just loves his guns and perforating terrorists and bad guys with bullet holes.

So, as fun as Travolta is to watch while he relishes his role as the gun-happy nut, there’s no understanding to attain of his character. Reese fares a little better on account that one of the story’s major outcomes is centered on the aforementioned secondary character.

Still, it’s a ball of loud, noisy fun for about 92 minutes. Travolta apparently liked his role so much he’s open to do a sequel for this film LOL.