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This French buddy cop action comedy owes its limited success to John Travolta. If you don’t love him stay an ocean away from this flick

New director Pierre Morel is better known for his twenty years of experience as a cinematographer than for anything related to directing. Even so, the camera work is this smashing action flick is what makes it fun to watch and Morel’s expertise made it happen. Of course the inimitable John Travolta in a bad-guy role makes it fun, too. He takes what would otherwise be just another slap-dash gun fest and turns it into something fantastic. Not fantastic in the sense that everyone will love it; it’s just that Travolta’s acting puts it over the top. When John enters the scene it ceases to be a film that takes itself too seriously. There is a joke in every scene along with the lighting fast action and no holds barred murderous mayhem.

As it turns out Mr. Morel has a way with bullets. This flick is half great gunplay and half great action photography. Travolta is Charlie Wax, a “special agent” sent to partner with US Embassy nerd James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). It is not completely clear what Reese is doing planting bugs in foreign embassies or what kind of a special agent Wax really is. All the better, nobody cares about such details anyway. Let’s get to the shooting, and fast.

Meet Charlie Wax. He’s a loud, boorish American whose bald-head, quirky shades and ‘screw you’ attitude suggest Bruce Willis’ midlife crisis. Charlie is also a spy, living in France while working to stop an intricate and dangerous web of Chinese drug dealers and Pakistani terrorists. Spy protocol would suggest dealing with such a complex and seemingly unrelated web of villains evasively and covertly. Not Charlie, who snorts coke, tear-asses through Paris shooting people and gleefully fires a rocket launcher from a bridge during rush hour.

Wax is an action movie creature of habit, all macho swagger and raving lunacy while somehow still playing for the home team, and he is on full display in Pierre Morel’s From Paris With Love. In better days we would get Willis as Charlie, but now must settle for John Travolta in the role. To his credit, he certainly gives it his all. Deliriously unhinged and trying to chew up the rest of the scenery he missed in last year’s Pelham, Travolta behaves as if he’s in a different picture than everyone else.

Unfortunately for everyone else, including Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Wax’s straight laced foil, the movie they are in is a frustratingly erratic affair that can’t decide whether it’s a colorful cartoon of explosions and chase scenes or some sort of serious espionage thriller. News flash to director Pierre Morel, who gave us last year’s Taken (aka Liam Neeson eats Paris); when your material focuses on a bald American biker taking on offensively one-dimensional evil nationalities while being as rude as humanly possible, ‘serious’ is not something you should even consider.

All of this has been envisioned as a kind of buddy movie, and it wants desperately to work. On some level, there’s a fun, go-for-broke, b-flick hidden amongst the over-heated pseudo-drama, but not enough of this irritating onion’s skin gets peeled to make it palatable. The obvious problem out of the starting gate is the same one that really prevented me from just going along for this arson-filled ride; it is painfully obvious that Meyers and Travolta have no chemistry together at all.

Overall:

I was on the edge of my seat and smiling for most of the movie, loving the little homages to Travolta’s character in Pulp Fiction. It was also great that every time there was an opportunity to break some glass, they made it happen. If you want to see a movie that’s not top of the line, but partially entertaining, this is it. Because even though it’s not groundbreaking, I still enjoyed myself.

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