Plots are for pussies and characters are for target practice.
That’s the mentality French writer/producer Luc Besson must swear by, if going by his back catalogue of supremely stupid, but undeniably exhilarating action movies such as The Transporter, Kiss of the Dragon and Taken. In other words, he specialises in making the kind of movies you don’t ever admit to enjoying.
Rip open From Paris With Love, the latest delivery from the Besson canon, and you’ll discover a film scarcely strung together by a shamelessly stereotypical terrorist plot and armed to the teeth with more action movie clichés than a Steven Seagal show reel. Yep, it has ‘guilty pleasure’ stamped all over it.
But Besson — who produced the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Adi Hasak (Shadow Conspiracy) — doesn’t deserve all the credit. You’d best thank director Pierre Morel (Taken, Unleashed) for successfully walking that fine line between explosive dumb fun and just plain ol’ dumb. Just as he did with Taken, Morel captures the action with the kind of style and intensity rarely seen in the age of shaky cameras and twitch edits. He also draws fiery, charismatic performances from his leads, which in this case is John Travolta as the utterly bonkers, utterly entertaining special agent Wax.
Before Travolta gets a chance to steal the show, Jonathan Rhys Meyers sets the mood as James Reece, an aide to the US ambassador in Paris. On the side, however, he’s a low-level agent for an American intelligence agency, living a luxurious life with his gorgeous French girlfriend Caroline (Kasia Smutniak). Desperate to see some real spy action, James gets his big break when he’s partnered with the agency’s best operative, Charlie Wax. What his handler fails to tell him is that Wax is possibly the most insane, reckless and fowl-mouthed agent on the planet.
For the sake of a witty punch line, I wouldn’t be surprised if Wax – who comes complete with his own catch phrase “wax on, wax off” – was from the same agency as Vin Diesel’s xXx. Both are consistently a close shave away from certain death, yet still manage to drop 10 gun wielding goons without a single drop of sweat forming on their shiny, bald heads. That said, Travolta’s performance has much more bad-ass pizzazz than Diesel’s, the result of Die Hard’s John McClane (Bruce Willis) being thrown in a blender with Pulp Fiction’s Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson), a character Travolta is well acquainted with. As it turns out, Wax also has a hankering for a Royale with Cheese.
Counteracting Travolta’s dynamism, Rhys Meyers plays it much straighter as James, which is necessary in keeping an ounce of humanity intact. The Irish actor/model holds his own during the action sequences, but when it comes time to delivering serious dialogue (not often), he has an odd tendency to enunciate words like a contestant on Wheel of Fortune.
Back to the *ahem* plot; the oddball duo find themselves at the tip of a bizarrely interconnected criminal conspiracy that works its way through a number of racial stereotypes before pinning it on the root of all cinematic evil, Islamic extremists. Ultimately though, the story is just as expendable as the infinite number of ditzy bad guys, all of whom are in desperate need of some shooting lessons. The zany action set pieces all transpire in Paris, but you wouldn’t know that if it wasn’t for the fleeting cutaway shots of the Eiffel tower and a peppering of French accents. Remove these and the film may as well have been titled ‘From a generic city in Europe…with Love’.
As with all of Besson’s films, enjoying From Paris With Love requires letting your better sense be taken hostage for around 90 frenetic minutes. If you can do that, you’ll be swept up by a capably directed, entertainingly performed homage to the action movies of the 80s and 90s, a time where “motherf***er” became Hollywood’s favourite adjective.
Verdict:
You get exactly what you pay for with From Paris With Love, and that’s plenty of bang for your buck.
Follow the author Anders Wotzke on Twitter.
