CINEMA: From Paris With Love

While medium-priced Paris-based movie Micmacs offers great all-round entertainment, the much bigger budgeted From Paris With Love proves bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better.

In fact, in this case it basically shows how you can make a real mess for lots of money.

James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is a smart young guy working for the American ambassador in Paris. It looks like a terrorist plot is afoot and Reese is asked to take pre-emptive action to make sure the ambassador doesn’t get hurt. But Reese is a rookie and so veteran CIA agent Charlie Wax (John Travolta) is called in to take charge of proceedings. If Reese was expecting a highly professional, disciplined individual to arrive at Charles De Gaulle Airport he gets a very rude shock when the loud, brash devil-may-care Wax walks in.

It’s obvious Wax is going to do things his way which means totally ignoring any orders he may be given and dashing around Paris shooting up, blowing up and burning up as much hardware and baddies as possible.

The problem with From Paris is it’s all macho leather trousers and no knickers. It certainly looks amazing with explosive car chases, massive shootout scenes and more firepower than Bond and Bourne put together, but its plot makes absolutely no sense at all and the major twist is so obvious when it finally does appear on screen you’ll almost hear yourself groan at the anti-climax.

As buddies in a buddy movie, Travolta and Rhys Meyers lack the chemistry of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, or Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black, and for all the film’s slickness it actually feels really clunky and rusty.

For sheer entertainment value Micmacs beats this would-be blockbuster hands down.

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