Review // FROM PARIS WITH LOVE - Wow!

Okay, this is easily one of the worst movies of the year and maybe the worst of Travolta's career. And that's really saying something. Now that there's no question as to how I feel about the quality of the movie, I can talk about all the things that make it great and it's actually all the same things that make it terrible. Confused? I am too. But this is how it is in 2010. Up is down and down is up. Movies have become so terrible that we have no choice but to sift through them to find some semblance of the things we used to crave. And in many cases their badness crosses some uncharted threshold and enters into the avant-garde.

From Paris With Love (great title for an action movie by the way, I can't imagine why it didn't catch on with audiences) makes it nearly impossible to tell whether the filmmakers intentionally went out of their way to make the funniest comedy of the year or are just terrible at their jobs. The "story" of American super spy Charlie Wax (Travolta) who is paired with spy-in-training Johnathan Rhys-Meyers to bring down terrorists in the city of lights is a loose collection of dated shootups and supremely lame jokes that may or may not be winks to an audience who were expected to be stoned. There are many, many WOW moments in the film, but none of them are attributed to cool action choreography or kick-ass set pieces. They're more like "Wow, what the fuck am I looking at?" moments.

For starters, Travolta appears 20 boring minutes into the movie and looks like this:

Wow!

Then he proceeds to kill a shitload of gun-toting waiters in a Chinese food restaurant before making a bunch of racist comments about Asians, which are never addressed by the filmmakers, and instead allowed to stand. Asian racism is the most socially acceptable form of racism in entertainment and From Paris With Love has a ball with this. After killing everyone in the room, sidekick Johnathan Rhys-Meyers asks Travolta if he thinks there's any more. He replies, "At last census-count? About a billion".

Wow!

Then Travolta shoots holes into the ceiling, all of which begin pouring streams of coke. How did he know this was going to happen? What does coke have to do with the under-written terrorist plot? I have no idea. Rhys-Meyers grabs a nearby vase and fills it with the coke and then proceeds to carry it around with him for the next 20 or so minutes, clutching it like a baby as he stumbles bewildered through one lame action scene after another. My wife Jenn asked me why Rhys-Meyers kept bringing the coke vase with him, even when he could have just left it in the car. I had no idea. I still don't.

Wow!

Throughout, Travolta employs an insane Matrix-style Gun-Fu with the aid of burly stuntmen, shaky cam and extremely quick cutting. The puffy, 50+ star dives and flips through action scenes like a super hero with a carb addiction, gleefully killing piles of faceless enemies while lovingly caressing his gun as if it were his life partner. At one point he shoots a man point blank in the face and then sensuously sniffs the gunsmoke before breaking into a rapturous post-coital smile.

Wow!

With From Paris With Love, Travolta is nakedly and desperately (and pathetically) grasping for the iconic cool he luckily achieved in the '90's with Pulp Fiction, a break he then spent 15 years squandering with one shitty movie after another. His role as super agent Charlie Wax once and for all proves that his comeback had absolutely nothing to do with any particular skill or charm of his own, and everything to do with Quentin Tarantino. The really, really bad script for Paris seems tailored and rewritten to appease Travolta's desires to conjure memories of his role as Vincent Vega. Charlie Wax says "mother fucker" a lot, sings to 70's FM pop songs and in one scene babbles on about Star Trek. It's pretty sad stuff, but it becomes crushingly embarrassing when Travolta flashes a shit-eating grin and winks for the audience as he chomps down on a "Royale with cheese" in not one, but two separate scenes.

Wow!

While sucking tremendously as a super killer spy and movie star, Travolta is at least fantastically entertaining in every single scene he's in. His negative attention-seeking performance is a cinematic car crash worthy of some serious rubber-necking. The buddy he's paired with on the other hand, Johnathan Rhys-Meyers, is one of THE worst, if not worst action heroes ever committed to film. The moment you see his thin stubble mustache you want to punch his face until your arm gets tired, and that's before his character devolves into the whining, white-man version of Murtagh to Travolta's gay-bear Riggs. While technically "pretty", Rhys-Meyers has a blank, unlikable face (sorry he does!) and when paired with a terribly underwritten stock character, he becomes a black hole of boredom sucking the rest of the movie toward his petulant core. In the middle of the movie, my wife informed me that Rhys-Meyers has been in and out of rehab for various substances. At the same time, on-screen Rhys-Meyers was being goaded by Travolta into snorting coke from his precious vase while crammed in a packed elevator rising to the top of the Eiffel Tower. I replied to her that he was definitely heading back. After some quick research: Paris opened in February. Rhys-Meyer's checked back into rehab in May.

Wow!

Out of nowhere and completely unexplained, Travolta and Rhys-Meyers (who is still stained with the blood of his first kill) show up to a dinner party at his apartment where his fiancee and her female friend are waiting. Travolta begins flirting with the friend who is of course a paid actress, so she gamely pretends to not be disgusted by his advances, despite the fact that the very sight of him could cause sudden, acute lesbianism. After dinner, with everyone laughing at jokes we didn't hear, the friends cell phone rings and its a wrong number, someone asking for "Rose". Much like his intuition that the Chinese are insulating their ceiling with cocaine, Travolta knows for certain that the friend is a terrorist and shoots her point blank in the head without a word. It really kills the mood of the dinner party.

Wow!

There is a single succinct, genuinely hilarious moment in the film that I think proves that director Pierre Morel (Taken, District 13) and French trash mogul Luc Besson are in on the joke of their film, proving that they are laughing with us, instead of us at them. It's a moment that justifies the entire existence of the movie and may in fact elevate it into the realm of brilliant social satire, so evocative and prescient as it is in our bizarre post-9/11 times. The moment, which is really just the utterance of a single loaded word, might go unnoticed however, which is a shame. Travolta and Rhys-Meyers ride in a gas-guzzling American SUV (surely a political statement, as it's the most unlikely of Parisian vehicles) from one confusingly violent encounter to the next. Travolta has once again convinced Rhys-Meyers to sniff some more coke from the vase (another tip that this action movie is not completely on the level) and begins revealing more of his mission, which is not just to kill Asian drug dealers, but to bust a cell of Middle Eastern terrorists. As the drugs pound Rhys-Meyers cortex, the image blurs and swirls and the T-word rings in his ears until his face is blasted with fear and he exclaims "TERRORISTS!". It's fucking hilarious. Travolta reinforces the paranoid notion saying "fuck yes, terrorists. It's always been about terrorists". From here the movie shifts it focus from bashing European decorum and the Chinese, to full-on, shameless demonizing of brown people.

Wow!

The plot is thread bare and exists only to be punctuated with bizarre touches that seem made up on the spot. Stuff like the vase of coke that becomes almost a third character for nearly half the movie, the action scenes that play like Abrahams/Zucker parodies of action scenes from 10 years ago, and basically every fucking creepy look on Travolta's creepazoid face. Maybe my addled brain has just absorbed too many junk movies, but with its tacky Eurotrash style I couldn't tell if Paris was actually being presented as cool, or was a knowing attempt at mocking the over-revved machismo of buddy action films. Either way, wow!