Released: February 5th, 2010
Starring: John Travolta, Johnathan Rhys-Meyers, Kasia Smutniak
Writer/Director: Luc Besson and Adi Hasak/Pierre Morel
Description: In Paris, a young employee in the office of the US Ambassador hooks up with an American spy looking to stop a terrorist attack in the city.
[Review may contain spoilers. Please watch movie before reading, unless you don't care. Most of these films have already been released for a while, so they should be readily available.]
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Spy-action movies are a genre that I don't think will ever go away. As long as people are fascinated by things that may or may not be going on behind the curtain. There's always a need for people to find entertainment in a group or field that is shroud in secrecy, with the government -- most notably, the CIA -- and the mob at the top of the list. But with this fascination comes the inevitable over-saturation of the genre, and the eventual fatigue by the audience until something truly great comes along.
"From Paris with Love" is the beginning of that fatigue. John Travolta stars as, Charlie Wax (really?!), an American Spy looking to stop a terrorist attack in France. He is teamed up with an employee of the U.S Ambassador to France named James Reece (Rhys- Meyers). After meeting each other, all your standard action movie quotas are met: The pair learn to trust each other, James kills his first person and doesn't know how to react, and Charlie has an affinity for big guns. The story movies along at a pretty quick pace as they try to figure out who is behind the drug ring that may have indirectly caused the death of the Secretary of Defense's daughter. But the pair stumble on to a plot to bomb a diplomatic summit meeting.
The big twist in the movie occurs when it is revealed that James' girlfriend had been spying on him the whole time they were dating, and that she is the bomber. It all concludes in a big action scene where James does things that would have gotten him shot on sight in real life. The scenes are pretty out there even for this genre, and they include Charlie destroying a vehicle with a rocket launcher, and James trying to dissuade Caroline (Smutniak) from finishing her mission by professing his love to her, which fails.
Travolta tries to incorporate two of his more famous characters that relate to this genre into Charlie Wax: Chilli Palmer and Vincent Vega. He wants Wax to be as smooth as Chilli and as lethal as Vega, but he just comes off as a parody of spies in the genre. He's nuts and a loose cannon, but also the best spy in the world. It's like the writers went to the spy character handbook and picked out a template. There is nothing original about his character, and Travolta does nothing to make it stand out. It's really a shame that he's fallen so far as a top notch actor, but I guess starring in "Wild Hogs" can do that.
Throughout the whole movie, I kept thinking that Rhys-Meyers would kick ass as Charlie. That's not good casting when your green, naive partner in the buddy spy movie looks just as bad ass as the "bad ass". There were even times when he out-acted Travolta, and it was hard to watch. But that does not mean that the character of James was well performed or well written, it just mean that he was able to rise above the material at times. The character itself has no real starting point in the story, and no real place in it, until the twist scene near the end.
The writing and direction was as paint-by-number as you could get in a genre that is full of copycat stories. If you couldn't predict what would happen next, then you obviously have not watched enough spy movies or you're in the 4th grade. Besides the predictable-ness of the script, it was very bland and didn't use Paris well enough -- it was the opposite of a Bond movie.
"From Paris with Love" is a run of the mill, popcorn action film with a very thin plot: bad guys bad, must stop bad guys. Even though the film has fun action sequences, I had a hard time not checking my phone or going on the internet. For all of its bluster and star power, it just isn't a very good movie, and possibly the end of this kind movie.
Rating: 5/10 -- Boring, but it's still an okay action film. Travolta needs desperately to jump start his career again, and when he does, he should call Tom Hanks.
The big twist in the movie occurs when it is revealed that James' girlfriend had been spying on him the whole time they were dating, and that she is the bomber. It all concludes in a big action scene where James does things that would have gotten him shot on sight in real life. The scenes are pretty out there even for this genre, and they include Charlie destroying a vehicle with a rocket launcher, and James trying to dissuade Caroline (Smutniak) from finishing her mission by professing his love to her, which fails.
Travolta tries to incorporate two of his more famous characters that relate to this genre into Charlie Wax: Chilli Palmer and Vincent Vega. He wants Wax to be as smooth as Chilli and as lethal as Vega, but he just comes off as a parody of spies in the genre. He's nuts and a loose cannon, but also the best spy in the world. It's like the writers went to the spy character handbook and picked out a template. There is nothing original about his character, and Travolta does nothing to make it stand out. It's really a shame that he's fallen so far as a top notch actor, but I guess starring in "Wild Hogs" can do that.
Throughout the whole movie, I kept thinking that Rhys-Meyers would kick ass as Charlie. That's not good casting when your green, naive partner in the buddy spy movie looks just as bad ass as the "bad ass". There were even times when he out-acted Travolta, and it was hard to watch. But that does not mean that the character of James was well performed or well written, it just mean that he was able to rise above the material at times. The character itself has no real starting point in the story, and no real place in it, until the twist scene near the end.
The writing and direction was as paint-by-number as you could get in a genre that is full of copycat stories. If you couldn't predict what would happen next, then you obviously have not watched enough spy movies or you're in the 4th grade. Besides the predictable-ness of the script, it was very bland and didn't use Paris well enough -- it was the opposite of a Bond movie.
"From Paris with Love" is a run of the mill, popcorn action film with a very thin plot: bad guys bad, must stop bad guys. Even though the film has fun action sequences, I had a hard time not checking my phone or going on the internet. For all of its bluster and star power, it just isn't a very good movie, and possibly the end of this kind movie.
Rating: 5/10 -- Boring, but it's still an okay action film. Travolta needs desperately to jump start his career again, and when he does, he should call Tom Hanks.
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