Film Review: From Paris with Love (2010)

There is a peculiar irony at play when a French production team crafts what amounts to a paean to the most bombastic excesses of Eighties Hollywood action cinema. From Paris with Love, directed by Pierre Morel and produced by Luc Besson, represents a curious transatlantic role reversal: where once American studios might have sought to inject European sophistication into their blockbusters, here the French filmmakers gleefully embrace the sort of unvarnished, politically retrograde spectacle that characterised Reagan-era multiplex fodder.

The narrative centres upon James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a lowly aide at the American Embassy in Paris who harbours ambitions of graduating from diplomatic drudgery to the cloak-and-dagger world of CIA field operations. His wish is granted in the form of Charlie Wax (John Travolta), a veteran operative whose approach to international relations owes more to automatic weaponry than diplomatic protocol. The pairing of the eager, bookish Reese and the utterly undiplomatic Wax inevitably recalls countless "buddy" cop formulae, though the film's true preoccupation reveals itself when their investigation into a routine drug ring uncovers connections to a Pakistani terrorist cell.

Morel, whose previous effort Taken had already demonstrated his appetite for brutally efficient action mechanics, here dispenses with any pretence of realism. Where Taken at least maintained a veneer of procedural credibility, From Paris with Love operates in a realm of pure cartoonish excess. Travolta, sporting a shaved head and goatee that signal "unhinged professionalism," delivers a performance of magnificent overstatement—yet herein lies the film's strange alchemy. The actor's well-documented tendency toward theatrical excess, which has capsized numerous previous vehicles, proves oddly suited to a character for whom deploying a rocket launcher on metropolitan streets qualifies as standard operational procedure.

Rhys Meyers, an actor hitherto associated with prestige television and art-house fare involving drug addiction, sexual ambiguity, or psychological disturbance, appears surprisingly at ease in what constitutes one of his first "straight" leading roles. He provides the necessary grounding against which Travolta's chaos agent may wreak havoc, though the screenplay affords him little beyond the familiar trajectory from bureaucratic naivety to hardened competence.

The film's most striking quality, however, is its gleeful disregard for contemporary sensibilities. Morel appears to be offering a defiant two-fingered salute to the conventions of modern Hollywood—and perhaps to his compatriots' customary cinematic prejudices. Where French cinema has traditionally luxuriated in sophisticated anti-Americanism and leftist intellectualism, From Paris with Love presents an unabashedly pro-American narrative in which the CIA represents the forces of order and the villains are dark-skinned Muslim terrorists treated with a brutality that makes Abu Ghraib appear positively restrained by comparison. The screenplay extends its politically incorrect embrace to include Communist Chinese antagonists and a notably dismissive attitude toward female characters—this is, unmistakably, a film made by men about men for men.

That such content avoids complete aesthetic bankruptcy owes much to the film's resolutely unserious tone. Morel understands that the material cannot withstand scrutiny and accordingly maintains a pace too frenetic for moral reflection. The Parisian locations serve merely as attractive backdrops for vehicular destruction and ballistic carnage; any romantic notions implied by the title are quickly obliterated by the sound of automatic gunfire.

Ultimately, From Paris with Love knows precisely what it is and for whom it is intended. It will find its audience amongst those who mourn the passing of the Eighties action template—films that divided the world into uncomplicated categories of good and evil and resolved complex geopolitical tensions through superior firepower. For viewers seeking nuance, plausibility, or progressive values, the film offers nothing; for devotees of "old school" mayhem, it delivers precisely what the title promises, albeit with considerably more cordite than romance.

Rating: 6/10

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