FROM PARIS WITH LOVE review: return to sender

From Paris With Love reeks of squandered potential. Charlie Wax could have been an iconic, entertaining character in his own right, and John Travolta’s performance is desperately trying to push the character in the direction of success, but something about the film’s script and direction really drags the otherwise entertaining character into the inescapable realm of mediocrity. How does this happen, one wonders?

Well, the first problem is with Jonathon Rhys Meyers’ character, Reece. Reece is fundamentally boring to us, routine and safe, and he’s unfortunately burdened with the responsibility of being the film’s protagonist. Rhys Meyers himself is an odd choice for the role of wannabe super-spy, and his vaguely European features only serve to confuse the fact that he’s a yank working for the US government in France — he looks a great deal more French than most of the French people we meet in the movie, and this might be a bit bemusing for some viewers. The first twenty-ish minutes are spent with Reece alone, whose job is the spy equivalent of “shit-kicker:” we follow him on a couple of boring assignments, and then follow him home for an extended couple of scenes forcibly and at great length showing us his romance with local lady Caroline (Kasia Smutniak). We spend so long with this girlfriend, in fact, that alarm bells start ringing in our heads — why is the film bothering to spend so long establishing a fairly routine relationship like this? Oh. I get it. Don’t you hate it when films lazily spoil themselves early on in the narrative?

Another problem is the script’s awkward pacing and situations. Scenes introduce a sense of urgency — I have to go now, honey — and then drag on for another couple of the minutes while the protagonist slowly gets his shit together, says a few protracted goodbyes, and then finally leaves. Important plot information is dumped in moving cars while the heroes are chasing down bad-guys, throwing conventional pacing under the train and potentially de-railing it. Violence comes and goes without warning or reflection, just sort of flashing itself about in a routine way as if to say “no really, this is an action movie, for real.” And once Travolta’s Wax character is introduced, Reece takes a back seat and becomes even more boring than he was when he was switching license plates and planting bugs in offices, confusing the audience’s perception of just who the hell the main character’s supposed to be.

The movie goes to great lengths to avoid the romantic portrayal of its eponymous city (the Eiffel Tower is only seen twice!), showing us instead the slums and backstreets and Chinese restaurants and freeways and terrorist cells — wait, what? — that usually go ignored in films focusing on the classic town. An eyebrow-raising decision by the screenwriters sees all the bad-guys in the film rotate between various ethnic minorities. Wax kills a lot of guys during the course of the film (remorselessly, and without giving any reason), but none of them is white. First it’s Chinese drug-dealers, then Chinese street-gangs, then some more drug-dealers, and then some vaguely Middle-Eastern people who are apparently planning to blow something up somewhere at some point (see next paragraph); Wax ruthlessly guns them down and, because he’s introduced as a racist character, he does so without mercy. This might amuse some people, but I found it a little cringe-worthy; for a movie with the words “Paris” and “love” in the title, From Paris In Love is a visually- and ethically-ugly portrayal of the city, which is a tricky artistic decision to justify.

Now to the plot. I have no idea what happens in this movie, because the crucial information necessary to comprehension are withheld from the audience in a cheeky scene in which Reece is too chemically-inebriated to understand what Wax is telling him. Wax is talking through some pretty important stuff here, justifying their mission and explaining the stakes and goals and threat at hand, but poor Reece is too high to catch a word of what Wax says, and the audience, watching through Reece’s eyes, is similar deprived of this information. At first, the audience reacts with a short ”ha ha,” but it quickly turns into “but seriously, though, tell me what’s going on.” The script never deigns to let us mere mortals in on the grand design, and so the climax is hamstrung of any tension or stakes. We don’t know why the bad guys are doing what they’re doing, or why they’ve chosen these particular targets to attack, or even who the bad guys are working for. We don’t know what motivates the traitor (whose betrayal you can predict within 10 minutes of the film’s opening) to don a suicide-bomber’s jacket and attack a small group of low-level governmental delegates — there is the hint of a romance with a jihadist creep, and some implied connections to the Middle-Eastern folk Wax relentlessly kills for about half an hour, but this lack of concrete motivation really hurts the film’s momentum and emotional impact.

The film is also hard to follow geographically. At one point the two heroes split up to pursue separate targets, and they seem to be down the road from each other, but Wax is hooning down a freeway somewhere in the middle of the countryside while Reece appears to be in the heart of Paris. The highway chase scene is easily the best action scene in the movie, but there’s a constant scratching sound coming from the back of your skull wondering where the hell anyone is any more. This failure to set up geography also pervades some of the interior action scenes, especially in the wildly-disorienting early shootout in a Chinese restaurant and then the subsequent mannequin warehouse bloodbath. The good guys and the bad guys are all wearing black and leather, with various styles of facial hair and black weaponry, and the action’s all cut to pieces, resulting in a barely-comprehensible montage of gunshots and stuntmen falling over. On at least three separate occasions in the mannequin shootout I thought Reece had been shot, only to see him standing miraculously unharmed in the corner of the room at the end of the scene — would it kill you to throw some lights up and shave your extras? Later shootouts and chase scenes remedy this somewhat, but it’s a bad way to introduce us to the violence of the world.

Once again the film has undergone a slight desaturation in post-production. It’s not as bad as in some recent movies, but the slightly-off flesh tones and washed-out blacks really kill the filmic aesthetic they have going on — why not shoot on digital, if you’re just going to wash the colour out anyway? This jars even more after watching Shutter Island, which has rich, natural colours that are way more fun to watch than this greyish stuff. The cinematography is a little uninspired as well, going for fairly stock-standard coverage rather than the kind of arty thing you could’ve gotten away with in a film about the City of Love. At least the music is occasionally jazzy and classical, even if it is kind of perfunctory in a movie about explosions and ear-popping gunshots.

Easily the best thing about the film is Charlie Wax, as played by John Travolta. Every now and then, when Wax says a line that doesn’t quite get a laugh, or when a scene doesn’t quite feel right, you get the impression that poor old Travolta genuinely gets Wax and is pushing the character as best he can, with or without the help of director Pierre Morel. Wax gets all the funny lines the script can muster, and there are some unique and amusing action set-pieces for Wax to overcome. I’ve never seen a guy burn a man’s face with the sizzling barrel of his gun, and I’ve never seen cocaine pour through bulletholes in the roof before, so it’s fun to see original moments like this even if they’re not shot or cut or written all that well. Like I said above, the highway chase scene is the best of the film; it’s the only point in the whole 90-minute movie that you feel an inkling of tension or excitement. That’s the other thing worth praising about the film — it knows it’s obnoxious and shallow, so it doesn’t overstay its welcome. 92 minutes is lean, clean and brisk, and should be the required target length of all non-triple A Hollywood directors.

Overall, the script should have undergone a few more drafts, shuffling the main characters and central plot so that they make at least a modicum of sense, and allocating each character a bit more to chew on in terms of motivation and dimensionality. The action ideas here are good, fresh, and entertaining, but they’re squandered with lousy shots and hyperactive editing. The dialogue and direction are nearly always off the beat, so a little more script polish and rehearsal time would have gone a long way. The ethnic minorites should be swapped out for US special forces or something, someone worth shooting besides petty thugs and gangs; something more morally comprehensible, if not morally sound. But most importantly, Reece should be the upstart new character introduced in the second act, not the dopey, useless character in charge of our narrative; this should be Charlie Wax’s movie, and nobody else’s. Wax is an absolute hoot, and he should be running the show, calling the shots, meeting the challenges and smashing through them with his perfectly-shaved noggin, not showing up to fix Reece’s mundane problems. It’s hard to begrudge From Paris With Love‘s old-school action sensibility and politically-incorrect sense of humour, but it’s also hard to accept or overcome the film’s myriad technical problems, ultimately landing the flick square in that most unpopular category of entertainment smugly labelled “mediocre.”

From Paris With Love score

39/100