Review: 'From Paris With Love': When French Xenophobia, Kick-Ass Action, and Travolta's Bald Head Collide

For a while there Luc Besson seemed a director who would actually be something of an important international film presence, with his energetic, artful thrillers like "Leon" and "The Fifth Element." But for the past decade or so he has been happy just being the French Roger Corman, shepherding a number of low-budget/high-profit B-movies and cultivating a small squad of directors who would go on to do bigger and better things stateside (like Louis Leterrier, who helms April's 3D "Clash of the Titans" redux). Looking back on his filmography, his own movies seem only slightly removed from the glossy junk he's writing and producing now.

The latest from the Luc Besson Guilty Pleasure Factory is "From Paris With Love," a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am thriller that's set in Paris but, with international appeal in mind, casts a couple of English-speakers in the main roles: American John Travolta and Irishman Jonathan Rhys Meyers. It's the typical buddy cop formula with these two: Meyers is a nerdy low-level embassy gopher with aspirations for espionage, while Travolta is the brash American with the "unorthodox style." (That "style" involves killing many, many people.) In a tale as old as time itself, the two are thrown together and forced to get along, crack a case, and save the day. Not necessarily in that order.

At one point the vagaries of the plot are unknotted (it has something to do with drugs and terrorists), but it's while both of the characters are high after snorting some coke they've confiscated (yeah, it's that kind of movie) so everything's all blurry and even harder to follow. Maybe the filmmakers realized that this thing was totally incomprehensible and so they gave up on the one moment that would have actually explained what was going on.

As it stands, the movie is a loose connection of sequences wherein Meyers and Travolta show up somewhere, scream or curse (or both), and then shoot everybody in the room. Since Meyers is the nerd, he doesn't do as much shooting (for a lot of the movie he's saddled with carrying a Chinese vase full of cocaine), but Travolta does. In director Pierre Morel's lively action sequences, Travolta gets to command some of the balletic physical presence that made him such a star in the first place; moves that he hasn't used with success since John Woo's lone American masterpiece "Face/Off."

And as fun as these action sequences are (they're also outrageously violent), there's still the nagging xenophobia and problematic gender politics that tug at your enjoyment of this trashy little movie. It seems that every non-French ethnic group is involved in this vast drug-terrorist plot, including some cartoonish Islamic suicide bombers. This is particularly squeamish when the duo ventures out to an outlying Parisian ghetto, where those riots from a couple of years ago still come to mind. Additionally, what seems like some bold, fresh female characterization goes all downhill in the last act to the point that we felt duped for appreciating it in the first place.

Director Morel, who helmed last year's rah-rah-revenge flick "Taken," is set to graduate from the Besson Action School with a big budget revamp of "Dune" for Universal, and he certainly shows his action chops here. In both energetic shoot outs (again: the amount of blood here is severe) and a graceful car chase towards the end of the film, he slickly embodies the fundamentals of action directing, including geographic consciousness and a sense of booting the audience into the middle of the chaos. He uses both post-"Bourne" franticness and slow motion sparingly and the sequences have a hard-edged dangerousness that's all but missing from American action flicks.

He also knows to leave Travolta well enough alone. With a shiny bald head and a round belly, Travolta even LOOKS hammy. And his dialogue with Meyers, as one long, successive curse word, is sharp enough to forgive the moments when he slips into faux jive talk. He's a live wire, for sure, and compared to Meyers' square drone, they've got a surprising amount of chemistry, even if it is decidedly low wattage.

For just over 90 minutes, on a cold ass winter's day, you could do a lot worse (like "Edge of Darkness"). Morel's fun-trash aesthetic never wears thin, and there's enough frenzied, stylized nonsense going on that you're never bored (even if you're not sure quite what's going on). Just try not to let its problematic political undercurrents get you down. On the positive side, though it taught us a valuable lesson: that there's not a problem in this world you can't solve by shooting it in the head. [B-] - Drew Taylor