“From Paris With Love”

Rated R (for strong bloody violence, drug content, pervasive language and brief sexuality).

 

“From Paris With Love” is just that: a frantic, manic, mindless action film, given by French film makers with, I assume, grand affection for the genre. The story and screenplay are written by Frenchmen. The film is directed by a Frenchman (Pierre Morel who did “Taken”). And it all takes place in Paris. I suppose that is the real meaning of the title.

Remember when “a French film” was a euphemism for a sexy film? Apparently, no more. This is martial arts film but without the use of bare hands and miscellanea. Know how Jackie Chan beats up everybody by using whatever is available: Venetian blinds, Silly Putty and a bowl of spaghetti? In this film, the tools for fighting bad guys would make NRA executives weep with ecstasy.

The death toll numbers around fifty or so and except for one suicide, the executioner is super-duper CIA agent/killer John Travolta, looking amazingly like Anton LaVey (the Satanist). His newly assigned “partner” is a nerdish, bookish, personal assistant to the American Ambassador to France. This meek dweeb is played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the slim, handsome, manly Irish guy who plays Henry the VIII on the HBO series.

So the movie is also a buddy film: an Odd Couple — but with big, shiny guns.

Basically, Travolta, a spy/cowboy is sent to Paris to kill some drug lords (mostly Asians and Muslims) and that spills over into Meyers’ character’s love life which leads to a terrorist plot to kill somebody like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

That is all you need to know. The rest is gunpowder and Travolta. I like Travolta. He plays this character so over-the-top that we sit back and enjoy the mayhem knowing it is all stuff and nonsense. However, without Travolta this film would have been a travesty of international proportions.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers is seemingly miscast as a wannabe spy with buckets of naiveté and a little boy’s belief in romance. No James Bond in this guy. But maybe it worked: during much of the film he chases after Travolta with a giant Chinese vase of cocaine cradled in his hands. That is pretty funny and it all has a point.

This is probably a forgettable film but it overflows with cheesiness and does so with Gaulish pride and no apologies. The film is blatantly overindulgent and so is Travolta and so are some of the gags. For example: there is a little inside joke about a Royale with cheese (which is a tip of the French film-makers beret to Pulp Fiction). There is no French finesse, symbolism, or Existential prattle in this serving of French Cinema, just action-action-action with gobs and gobs and gobs of fromage.

“From Paris With Love” earns two and a half bow ties out of five.