From Paris With Love Movie Review

Written on February 7, 2010 by Marc Eastman in Movies

Sometimes you find yourself just asking, “Why?” A good percentage of the time the answer turns out to be that a goodly portion of those people who actually buy tickets are going to go see something. It’s Friday night. You don’t want to go see the love story, but you’re not particularly in the mood for comedy, and whatever actiony thing is at the theater is what you’re going to pick. Some movies get made just to be that option.

From Paris with Love is such a film. However, it does have a few things going for it that at least distinguish it from much of the knocked out for the sake of knocking something out fare. When Luc Besson‘s name is on a film, there is at least some hope that it will stand out in some way. While he isn’t quite batting 1,000, he still has a far better average than most players. Of course, the problem there is that he directed his best stuff, and here he didn’t even write the screenplay. This one is just “based on a story by.”

The story kicks off with James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) working at the American Embassy in Paris. He’s a low-level… spy, I suppose, and he’s in love. Things are looking good, and it even looks like he might be moving on to bigger and better spy operations. He’s told to pick up his new “partner” who is having some difficulty clearing customs.

This is the point at which James gets caught up in the action. His new partner, Wax (John Travolta), is apparently the bigtime when it comes to the spy game, and before James has any handle on what’s going he’s counting the kills using a per hour ratio. It takes quite a while before he has any real idea what’s going on, but it apparently involves drug dealers and terrorists.

There isn’t all that much to get excited about in From Paris with Love, and yet it wasn’t all that bad either. There was at least a bit of something going on along with all the fights and gunfire. There are some twists during the ride, and though you may see them coming, it isn’t exactly the kind of film that you want to brag about outsmarting.

It also has two things going for it which are likely to sound odd, or at best damning with faint praise, but they stood out to me.

First, it has a very different kind of action theory working behind it. Though there are car chases, fight scenes, and long shootouts to be found, a lot of the action somehow just isn’t. People are killed off screen as Reese trails in Wax’ wake. Wax hangs out the window of a car during a high-speed chase in order to fire a rocket at the car he’s chasing, but stops to answer his cell phone. There’s an almost sauntering pace as Wax moves from room to room through an apartment building filled with drug dealers, and he stops to have tea when making use of an elderly man’s apartment so that he can jump out the window. It’s a kind of anti-action philosophy that is butting heads with a more straight-forward action philosophy, and it’s interesting to watch.

Second, by the time it ended I’d never really gotten bored with it. That’s not what they’re going to display prominently on the DVD release, but it’s worth more than you think. The film gets in, does what it needs to do, and gets out, and there’s enough variety to the play that you’re never hoping it will move along. Among action vehicles that are just out there to be a choice, this is rather high up on the food chain.

It’s actually a lot of fun for what it is, and Travolta is surprisingly entertaining as an outlandish, vulgar… whatever he is.

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