From Paris With Love: Goes From Bad To Worse

What the hell has happened to John Travolta’s career? I’ll pass up the opportunity to make a Scientology crack here, because I still have a soft spot for Travolta. He used to be one of my favorites. But if From Paris With Love proves anything, the guy needs a serious career intervention. This is the kind of movie that gives the action genre a bad wrap and solidifies Hollywood’s reputation overseas for making stupid drivel. The truly odd thing is that the movie is directed by a Frenchman, Pierre Morel! Morel spent a long time toiling away as a cinematographer on the Luc Besson assembly line scored a big hit last year with Taken. Taken wasn’t a great movie by any means, but it was extremely enjoyable thanks to the offbeat casting of Liam Neeson as a badass super-spy dad and well-made.

John Travolta can be just as charismatic as Liam Neeson, but he has played variations of his role in From Paris With Love many times and in much better movies. He basically played the exact same part in Swordfish, except in  Swordfish Travolta was viewed as the bad guy while this one views him as the good guy. But like I said, Travolta is always fun to watch because he brings such energy and charisma to everything he does. So I don’t necessarily mind seeing him play a similar character as long as it’s fun. The problem is that From Paris With Love is just so incredibly preposterous and incoherent.

The film doesn’t just go over the top; it skyrockets over it. Even the characters in the movie don’t seem to know what the movie is about. That’s a problem in my book. I’m thinking Morel was trying to make a ridiculously crazy movie that worked as an action movie and a parody, but it doesn’t do either of those things well. Hot Fuzz was the perfect action movie parody. From now on, action filmmakers need to focus on scaling back the ridiculousness and trying to make a believable story. From Paris With Love doesn’t do that. It just feels like a big LSD mash-up of elements culled from everywhere under the sun. Look at the trailer. Just in the trailer alone, virtually every action movie cliché in the book occurs. Travolta is the last line of defense but also the best! He doesn’t play by the rules! He’s a maverick! Jonathan Rhys-Meyers does everything by the book! If these two guys can learn to stand each other, the criminals don’t stand a chance! Yikes. Yikes yikes yikes.

Travolta—ill-advisedly stealing Mr. Clean’s look—plays Charlie Wax, an American spy with a zany love of guns who goes around trying to sound cool and hip and devil-may-care and spouts inane, forced catchphrases like “Wax on, wax off.” Get it?! It’s a Karate Kid reference, and it’s his last name! Ha! Woo! Rhys-Meyers—who must have agreed to be in this movie so he could buy a boat or a condo—plays James Reese. Reese was educated in Cambridge, plays chess and works as an aide to the U.S. ambassador in Paris. He’s a low-level operative that wants to be a big cool agent. Basically, he’s a mild-mannered, lily-livered nimrod who gets paired up with Wax. How and why aren’t important.

These two guys go all over town, Rhys-Meyers the green straight man to Travolta’s wacky veteran agent. What are they doing? Something about taking down a Chinese drug ring. Or wait, I mean stopping terrorists. Or wait, I mean…I don’t know. And guess what? Neither does the screenplay.

The bad guys are all nondescript cartoons with no real discernible agenda. That’s an automatic downfall for any action movie. The villain has to be as interesting, complex and layered as the hero. That’s why actioners like Die Hard and In The Line of Fire are so powerful and are in rarefied air. But Travolta should know this better than anyone. He made Face/Off, which I consider to be the greatest non-franchise action movie ever made. The match-up between hero and villain was dynamite in that movie because the conflict was so personal between them and they were both three-dimensional characters. Definitely not the case in From Paris With Love. Even the title is stupid and derivative.

This is the buddy action movie nobody asked for. I don’t know why that subgenre is so hard for filmmakers to get right. It seems like it should be an easy setup. But except for Lethal Weapon, 48 Hrs., Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run and a few others, it never works. Travolta and Rhys-Meyers have virtually no chemistry and the script doesn’t do them any favors. As for the action? Sure, we’ve got Travolta blowing up cars with rocket launchers and rappelling through glass windows and taking on five guys at once. The problem is once again the hyper-stylized, MTV-drenched rapid editing that gives you no sense of the weight of the action or the geography and the fact that you can always spot Travolta’s stunt double, something I complained about last week with Edge of Darkness. If you can’t do the stunts anymore, you shouldn’t be making this kind of a movie.

If you want to see John Travolta do awesome action and tear up the screen with bravado, watch Broken Arrow. Or watch any number of his much better movies like Face/Off, Primary Colors, A Civil Action, Phenomenon, The General’s Daughter, Get Shorty, Pulp Fiction or even last summer’s The Taking of Pelham 123. Just don’t go see this thing. I’m sure he’ll redeem himself with Wild Hogs 2. If that movie is half as good as the original—which was an undeniable cinematic triumph—we’ll all be in for a real treat.