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.
Meyer’s James Reece is a government agent with a wonderful girlfriend and a few quickly sketched character quirks who almost immediately finds himself with a target on his head when he meets the reckless Wax. After that, Morel and scripter Luc Besson throw the two through an escalating series of emotional plot hoops that eventually decimate any goodwill that Travolta has earned. Schizophrenic is an understatement and I like to imagine that Besson’s plotting technique involves throwing darts at an open page of the Flammable Materials handbook.
The action scenes have a certain goofy sensibility but they have none of the kinetic energy or playful spirit that Besson’s best films possessed. I’m a huge fan of The Big Blue, Leon: The Professional, The Fifth Element and Morel’s earlier District B-13, but each of those films had the courage of their nutty convictions. They were big stupid events that circumvented dimness by injecting serious doses of wit and irony into their characters. Even less-than-successful later pics like Kiss of the Dragon had the benefit of a strong rapport between the leads. Sadly, Paris has neither and it suffers for that.
But, stodgy critic guy, doesn’t Paris work as a turn-your-brain-off Friday night action flick? Isn’t that all it wants to be? Perhaps, and while I suppose there will be a small audience who buy what it’s trying to sell, it’s safe to say that Love isn’t the kind of thrill ride anyone will remember tomorrow. I had trouble staying connected while it was playing.
It’s rather fortuitous that District 13:Ultimatum, the sequel to Morel’s own 2006 actioner, also opens today because it provides a perfect counterpoint to my argument. That film is no less violent, unhinged or dopey than Paris, but it works because of a single-minded devotion to its mad, mad premise, because it generates a real energy in its action scenes and delivers believable camaraderie between its leads. Paris fails not because of what it is, but because of how poorly it goes about being what it is. The result is a tedious popcorn flick that’s more glaring than Travolta’s hairless noggin.
