From Paris With Love-You Know You Like It

1960texan | Feb 9, 2010 |

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There's an art to reading a movie review. Sometimes the film critic has an agenda, and desperately wants the movie to be something it is not. "So many missed opportunities," they cry. "This film could have been so much more," they write. Such is the case with quite a few of the reviews of "From Paris With Love".

Directed by Pierre Morel (Taken) from a story by Luc Besson, "From Paris With Love" stars John Travolta in a gleeful, over the top performance as Charlie Wax, spy. Sure, the plot is thin, but this is not supposed to be a capital F Film, but an entertaining action flick designed to have you shoveling popcorn in your mouth as you lean back for the ride, and that is where it succeeds.

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers plays James Reese, a low-ranking intelligence operative working for the American Ambassador in France. Yearning for his first field assignment, he's partnered with Travolta's Wax, a wise-cracking loose cannon sent to stop a terrorist attack.

Travolta was born to play an action star. Even at the less than tender age of fifty-six the man still has the extraordinary grace that propelled him to stardom in all of those seventies dance movies. Much has been written about the shaved head and goatee he sports in the film, but make no mistake about it: Travolta is believable as Charlie Wax because he physically inhabits the imposing assassin with the panache of a natural athlete. Sure, there are a few missteps. The "Pulp Fiction" reference, co-star Jonathan Rhys-Meyers' supposed New York accent, but everyone involved knows that they weren't filming Shakespeare.

Typically, when a movie is released on Superbowl weekend it's because the distributor doesn't have faith in it, and it dies a quite death at the box office. The paltry three million dollar opening this flick garnered would seem to be an omen of its impending demise, but I predict that "From Paris With Love" is going to do much better than Lionsgate apparently felt it would. Look for next week's box office take to be a lot higher than three million dollars.

Full disclosure: I love French movies, and have always been a huge fan of Luc Besson. Angel-A is a favorite, as well as the first Transporter film. That said, "From Paris With Love" stands on its own as a fun thrill ride that would have been better suited as a summer release.