Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
2/15/10
Director Pierre Morel made
his English-language debut on last year's retro delight Taken,
which took us back to a time when high-body-count familial vengeance was
the bread and butter of the action genre. A year later, he revisits
another bygone movie era, the time after Lethal Weapon when any
two actors found walking down the street at roughly the same time would
be grabbed and paired in a crass, violent and pointless plot that had something
to do with drugs. Add that layer of Western cultural obliviousness
that second-tier English-language products from Luc Besson's Europa Pictures
factory often sport, and you get From Paris With Love, a crass,
violent and pointless check-casher that pairs an abysmally chemistry-free
John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in a script that seems to have been
spat out by a Random Buddy Movie Generator that really, really doesn't
care for Arabs.
James Reece (Jonathan Rhys
Meyers) works at the American Embassy in Paris, but also performs low-level
espionage work for a shadowy intelligence organization. He yearns
to be a “real” agent, and so he pounces on the chance to “partner” with
legendary agent Charlie Wax (John Travolta) who's in town on unspecified
business. He's to pick him up and drive him wherever he wants to
go until his work is completed. Wax seems like a total psycho, turning
everyplace they go into a bloodbath as he searches first for drugs, then
drug dealers, then drug money-sponsored terrorists. As Reece grows
more and more disillusioned with this violent world, the trail they're
following circles back to surveillance photos of him. Any chance
his fiancee Caroline (Kasia Smutniak) knows anything about that?
I'd synopsize the plot in
greater detail, but that would have required me understanding it.
After a mildly endearing scene between Reece and his boss Ambassador Bennington
(Richard Durden, giving the movie's best performance, which is not really
a compliment) and an awkward one between he and Caroline (or “Caroleeeeen”
as Rhys Meyers insists on pronouncing it), the movie makes the mistake
of introducing Wax, a typical stereotypical Euroflick American who shoots
anything he doesn't have sex with. The role is a bad, bad fit for
Travolta, who keeps trying to inject some sort of humanity into this demented
psychopath, only making him less and less likable. It doesn't help
that he also sports a wildly unflattering look with a bald scalp and bushy
goatee. But then Rhys Meyers doesn't have a lot of luck playing his
straight man either, seeming oddly unconvincing as a guy in a suit.
No sugarcoating it, the screenplay
by Adi Hasan (coming 13 years after his previous produced script, the dull-as-dust
Charlie Sheen vehicle Shadow Conspiracy) is awful. Besson
gets story credit, so he can be blamed in part for the film's “Wax walks
into a room, freaks out and shoots everybody” structure, but not for its'
putrid dialog, which goes back and forth between flat as a board and ridiculously
tin-eared. Plus, it rarely holds together from one scene to the next,
as when Reece spends two reels singing the praises of his fiancee and how
she's “not like other women” only to inform us later that he “never thought
to ask” anything about her: “I know nothing about this woman!”
I'm willing to consider the
possibility that hacksaw editing produced the total lack of setup or consideration
of most of the characters and situations. Why does Reece want to
be a real spy? Nothing remotely spylike that he comes into contact
with excites him in the least and he keeps whining about the need to do
nothing that doesn't have official sanction. For that matter, his
organization exists only as a comically random voice on a phone that finally
tells him to stop calling. Characters appear out of nowhere and are
not introduced, leading to a whole lot of screen time spent wondering “Is
that the terrorist from before? I thought he was dead.”
The stars are lousy both
together and apart, and the endless gun battles Morel stages do nothing
to shock them to life. There's a well-shot car chase late in the
game (how rare these days to actually see extended aerial shots that allow
us to follow the action), but the over-use of unmatching stunt doubles
for Travolta (who has traditionally been a hard actor to double for some
reason) takes the wind out of even the movie's most energetic chase sequences.
From Paris With Love
is most notable to US audiences as a snapshot of the anti-Muslim backlash
that's spawning laws banning many of their preferred wardrobes and architecture
across Europe. This is the movie Michael Medved's been dreaming of
in Opt-Ed pieces ever since 9/11: terrorists with oily black hearts
of pure Islamic hatred will convert anyone they spend three minutes with
into suicide bombers! No balancing positive characters or “The Koran
preaches peace!” protests here: From Paris With Love stands
firmly with the Freedom Fries crowd, ironic given that it's a French production.
Which is not to say there isn't room for more hard-core Islamic Fundamentalist
villains in Hollywood movies: obviously American filmmakers have
stepped so lightly around this issue as to be comical at times. But
the reason they've done so, rightly or wrongly, is to avoid the sort of
seething cinematic hatred that's on display here. Of course, the
movie's not much kinder to the many Oriental victims of Wax's wrath, or
to Wax himself, who's an Ugly American among Ugly Americans, so it can
be argued to be an equal opportunity offender.
I had hope for about 5 minutes
that it was simply getting off to a slow start, but there wasn't a second
of From Paris With Love that truly engaged me. It's pure and
simple filler that paid for Parisian vacations for a couple of stars who'd
have otherwise had to pay for them themselves and just about nothing else.
Come to think of it, it makes the likes of Shakedown and Tequila
Sunrise seem like cinematic classics of a bygone age by comparison. |
