As you may have noticed (you clever-clogs, you), I normally opt for a silly title that’s somehow loosely related to the film I’m reviewing, but in this case it’s completely unnecessary. From Paris with Love isn’t so much a bad title as it is exceptionally generic - almost any film that features La Ville-Lumière could be called From Paris with Love. As I had to explain to every person who asked me what film I was seeing that day, it’s not a bad rom-com – it’s a worse action movie.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers, aka Mr Roboto, whirs and clunks his way along, playing boring-as-a-biscuit James Reece; aide to a U.S. ambassador in France. He’s also a low-level spook for some inexplicable reason, whose dream of dreams is to play with the grown-up spies. Meyers puts on a very mediocre American accent for the part, but the guy is Irish so we’ll cut him some slack. No slack shall be cut for Travolta however, who has enough experience to know that if a character didn’t work for The Taking of Pelham 123, the same character with a different name (Charlie Wax – hahaha…. bahahahahaha…) won’t work the second time around either. Einstein once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It’s also the definition of stupidity.
From Paris with Love is a film flawed from the get-go. The opening is an uninteresting driving scene that has nothing to do with the film. The set-up is weak, leaving the viewer with no interest in the hero or his journey. Technically this hero is Reece, but he’s inactive and just follows Wax; a rookie filmmaking mistake. The act break is sloppy, and then we immediately jump to a random shoot-out in a Chinese restaurant that leads to a series of random shoot-outs, each one more derivative and uninspired than the last. For a couple of spies, Reece and Wax do very little intel/recon work. Fortunately for them, the location of the next shooting gallery falls magically from the sky time and again, they wander in, Wax empties a clip of bullets into every living thing, and they go skipping off to the next place. Someone (presumably the screenwriter) has tried to thicken the plot by adding a couple of turns, but it comes out like packet gravy; thin with lumpy bits, and ultimately unappetising. Such lumpy examples are: ‘Actually, we’re not chasing drug-dealers. We’re chasing terrorists!’ and: ‘Hey Reece, your girlfriend is one of those terrorists!’
Both the dramatic tension and the comedic relief are supposed to come from the odd-couple relationship between the methodical, straight-as-a-Baptist-preacher Reece and the wacky, loose-cannon Wax. Obviously it doesn't work because I used the phrase ‘supposed to’ and I’ve already mentioned that this movie is bad. There’s practically no screen time devoted to setting up the character of Reece and literally none for Wax; we meet him when Reece does, half-way through verbally abusing a French customs officer. (As a side note, French customs officers are no joke. I’ve seen them give a guy a proper kicking for yelling at an airline attendant.) Reece and Wax aren’t characters; they’re cut outs – flimsy ones that have been left out in the rain overnight. I’d prefer to believe that it was an issue of casting, and make no mistake, the acting was all sorts of bad, but I have an inkling there was a slight oversight in letting a complete unknown write the screenplay. And what the fuck has happened to Luc Besson? He made Leon and Nikita, both absolute genius films, so why would he hand his story over to a pleb and request that he make it into a screenplay? Besson must have done something really bad, like run over Sarkozy’s dog, and his punishment is this strange brand of public humiliation.
In the end Reece gives his terrorist fiancé a lovely engagement gift – a new hole in the head, courtesy of his 9mm. She gives him a ring that belonged to her father and he reciprocates by shooting her through the frontal lobe. It seems uncalled for. Then again, the ring did have a tracking device in it, and it’s very likely the fiancé was lying about it belonging to her dad in the first place. The scene that follows the fiancé head-shoot is my absolute favourite, not only because it’s the last scene of the film, but because it’s hilarious, albeit unintentionally. Wax hands Reece a paper bag containing ‘something to remember her by.’ It’s a strip of passport-sized photos showing an intimate moment between Reece and his fiancé… the one he just murdered.
I’d like to end on a positive note by saying that there was one thing I liked about From Paris with Love. As someone who's lived in
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