Missed Mindless Movie - From Paris With Love

We joked that From Paris With Love was a romantic comedy starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Travolta (an unconventional romantic comedy, I guess). And it certainly opened like one. Meyers had the French artist moustache going on, and the music was certainly romantically based.

But then it got going with stereotypically spy stuff. Meyers turns out to be more than a high-level diplomatic aide, and soon he’s ordered to bring John Travolta past customs. Travolta’s doing a bad American stereotype (loud, rude, swearing like a sailor) to cover up the fact he’s trying to smuggle his favourite gun past French security. Meyers slaps a diplomatic cover on the bag, and we’re off to the races.

Soon, Travolta’s proven to be awesomely spectacular with both guns and hand-to-hand combat (seriously? He’s 56!) and bullet-proof, besides. Lots of action ensues. Soon comes a betrayal I did not see coming, followed by a freeway chase that was fast but not terribly furious, and a climax that was mostly emotional.

There were certain problems with this movie. One important person appearing later in the film definitely holds the idiot ball. In this day and age, security is given priority over schedule. That’s just the way it is. Secondly, I would have preferred more action at the climax, but the way the plot was going, there wasn’t a whole lot the writers could do about that, so I'll give it a reluctant pass. Meyers gets shot in the arm, but it’s a standard movie injury. After a few hours, it’s out of the sling it’s supposed to be in, and all he does is hold it occasionally and grimace. Travolta appears to be the only one who can aim an automatic weapon. All the bad guys blast away indiscriminately, but hit the walls around him, while he can kill them with abandon (and he does). A lot of his lines that are supposed to be funny fall flat instead.

There are some funny bits. They spend the first half of the movie carting around what looks like a Ming vase full of cocaine (it’s evidence). So Travolta goes blasting everything while Meyers has to hug this vase during all the set pieces. There’s a great line about a Royale with Cheese that harkens back to Pulp Fiction.

All in all, it’s a new rental movie. There are too many problems to see it in theatres, but there’s too much action to wait for a while. So we watched it on Blu-Ray and that worked out pretty well.