From Paris With Love

From Paris With Love is a movie that shows you better have good writing if you want to be a traditional action thriller. Otherwise, just blow stuff up with a vengeance and let people enjoy the ride.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers stars as Reece – the personal aide to the U.S. Ambassador to France. As you can imagine, this gives him a great deal of access to the upper echelons of power (as well as invitations to fancy parties with tasty appetizers), which comes in handy as he moonlights for a mysterious organization where Reece is some sort of spy in training. To get promoted to special ops, Reece needs to prove himself on his biggest assignment yet.

Charlie Wax (John “You Can Tell My Character is Crazy Because I Am Bald” Travolta) is a new operative arriving in Paris for a big, top secret assignment, and, as I mentioned earlier, Charlie is CRAZY! Now, Reece has to drive him around.

Why is Charlie in town?

Are these guys good spies, or bad spies?

Will they live another day?

From Paris With Love is one of those movies that shouldn’t take itself so seriously. In the beginning, director Pierre Morel and writer Adi Hasak make From Paris With Love a camptastic, over the top, insane movie relying on Travolta’s nuttiness to keep the audience interested. Much like Drag Me To Hell or Shoot ‘Em Up, we know this is not a great film, but it’s funny.

Early on, From Paris With Love is more of a video game than taught thriller as Wax and Reece go to a location, shoot everything in sight, blow stuff up and cause so much damage the insurance company will raise the rates by 200%. Then, they move on to the next location to do it all again. Not much thought is put into what their assignment is supposed to be or judging the morality of what they do, but Travolta gets to toss in a few funny one-liners, along with some moronic dialogue, and Rhys Meyers does well as the uptight, less experience dude who is horrified at what’s going on around him.

Unfortunately, Morel and Hasak try to get serious in the second half of the film, and From Paris With Love goes from acceptably goofy to downright ridiculous, flat and meaningless. When it’s campy, at least the movie is something. However, when it takes this serious turn and tries to become a traditional thriller with all sorts of twists and turns where nothing is at it appears, the movie becomes flaccid. We couldn’t care less what happens or who gets hurt.

From Paris With Love suffers when Morel and Hasak start to play it safe.

From Paris With Love is rated R for strong bloody violence throughout, drug content, pervasive language and brief sexuality.