"From Paris With Love" - But No Mercy

Oh, Pierre Morel, I can't get away from you can I?

"From Paris With Love" is one of those films that I would have never been tempted to watch on my own. It's a European action spectacle from the man who gave us "Taken," peripherally associated with the great Luc Besson, who gets a story credit. The trailers from earlier in the year made this look like a tired exercise in over-the-top shoot-em-uppery in the City of Lights, which it is. The best thing I can say about it is that it's self-aware and mercifully unpretentious.

It takes a while for the mayhem to truly descend on the picture. At first, we seem to have a spy story unfolding, with a low-level American CIA operative, James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), working as a personal aide for the US ambassador to France. He's tired of only planting bugs and switching out car license plates on behalf of the spooks, and angles for more interesting assignments that could get him promoted to a full agent position. And shortly after becoming engaged to his lovely girlfriend Caroline (Kasia Smutniak), Reese gets the chance. He's sent off to collect a special agent from the airport who's been held up at customs. This turns out to be Charlie Wax (John Travolta), a cocaine snorting, skirt-chasing, hedonist who scoffs at the rule book and employs over-the-top violence at the drop of a hat.

Wax and Reese spend the rest of the movie crashing around Paris, provoking Asian drug dealers, Arab terrorists, and all manner of lowlife reprobates into big, loud, flashy fights. There are shootouts, chase scenes, a big set piece with a helicopter, and multiple explosions. But the pace is so fast, the action sequences seem to merge into one another, and the plot points tying it all together are often incoherent. I understand why we're initally supposed to be disoriented, the way Reese is at first trying to keep up with Wax as they charge from one ludicrous situation to the next. Unfortunately the confusion never quite subsides, even after Reese finds his footing. When a big twist does occur at the end of the second act, it barely has any impact because of how bad the set-up is. Exposition frequently seems to be missing or severely truncated.

The action isn't very impressive, and Morel's breathless pacing and blink-and-you-miss-it editing style don't help. But the real trouble is that the action has no narrative weight. An hour after I saw "From Paris With Love," I could barely remember any of the individual chase or gunfight sequences, and the muddled story didn't help matters. I've seen plenty of action films that have similarly weak plots, but manage to distinguish themselves with distinctive set pieces. Here, it's all the same generic action filler that we've seen in a hundred other films, but without the benefit of a real action star like Jason Statham or even Tom Cruise to keep it interesting. John Travolta is certainly a charismatic performer, but he's better at instigating the fights than making them fun to watch.

It gets frustrating because I can see bits and pieces of a better film here. I like both of the actors, and their performances aren't bad. John Travolta, looking more like Bruce Willis these days with a shaved head and goatee, sure seems like he's having the time of his life playing the amoral hero. Charlie Wax is a pretty appealing guy, despite a predilection for shooting people in the face first and asking questions later, but he's so cartoonish in his outrageous behavior, it's difficult to buy him as a CIA agent of any stripe. He resembles nothing so much as good old Vincent Vega from "Pulp Fiction," after putting on a couple of pounds and losing a little gray matter to the drugs and drink over the years. There's even a playful callback to the Royale with Cheese bit, probably the only thing this film will be remembered for.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers does a decent job in the thankless straight man role, even if he does go around with a mustache that makes him look like a bad cliche of a French waiter. There's something a little off about his American accent - the actor is Irish - but he juggles French, Mandarin Chinese, and a bit of German dialogue with surprising ease. He has enough chemistry with Kasia Smutniak to make their scenes together very watchable, and pulls off the big dramatic moments of the climax with a straight face. Still, I couldn't help feeling that he and Travolta were acting at cross purposes, with such different approaches, it often felt like they were in different movies. It's only at the very, very end that they have a conversation where both of them are on the same wavelength. But I don't blame the actors.

I place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the director, because there's no reason why this film had to be such a frenetic, uneven mess. The stylistic excess is so out of control, it verges on the satiric. After seeing two of Pierre Morel's films now, his modus operandi is becoming clear - bigger, louder, faster, and dumber. In fact I think he'll be the perfect director to reboot the "Transformers" franchise in a couple of years, if he isn't taken down by whiplash from one of his own films first.