By Scott Marks
SDUN Film Critic

“From Paris With Love”
Directed by Pierre Morel
Written by Adi Hasak from s story by Luc Besson
Starring: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, John Travolta & Kasia Smutniak

Rating: 1 out of 5

The 2009 movie season started with a bang. Pierre Morel’s “Taken” was last year’s most electrifying action thrill ride. With only two films to his credit (“District B13” and “Taken”), Morel has already established himself as a major action director. I had every reason to enter “From Paris with Love” with high expectations.
Lightning did not strike thrice.
It’s one thing for a film not to live up to one’s expectations and another to be bored silly by it. It takes what seems forever for what little quality action there is to ignite. Will Travolta ever show his face and when he does will the movie finally start to hum?
He does, but it doesn’t. Both of Morel’s previous hits open on action. “From Russia With Love” crawls to a start with a solid reel of exposition and back story involving James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and his fiancé, Caroline (Kasia Smutniak).
James leads a double life. By day he serves his country as a personal aide to the U.S. ambassador in France. At night he moonlights as a low level CIA operative nursing a burning desire to make it to the big leagues. Caroline is hip to both jobs and appears to be cool with it. Too cool. For an action thriller they sure do expend a lot of time hammering home the lovey-dovey angle.
If you can’t see the ending to this one coming than you’re blindfolded and seated in another theater.
James is assigned a partner and when Charlie Wax (Travolta) does finally arrive about one reel (20 minutes) into the proceedings, it’s only under the silliest of circumstances. He’s being detained at the airport unable to get to his favorite brand of energy drink past customs. Never mind a suspicious suitcase containing new-age beverages. Any airport X-ray technician would have spotted the individual parts of a makeshift gun concealed in every can. Travolta needed a big scenery-chewing introduction and this is the best the screenwriter could come up with.
Travolta, looking dangerously close to Ming the Merciless, decides his first night in Paris will be spent shooting up a Chinese restaurant. Cocaine raining down from the ceiling through bullet holes from the upstairs supply house indicates a stylistic sensibility at work. When Wax instructs James to cart around a vase filled with the powder, the terribly unfunny running gag that ensues isn’t worth the momentary visual flair.
Wax’s flamboyant style of maiming and murdering does yield at least one good scene. Before ascending a spiral staircase, Wax instructs James to follow several paces behind. Gunshots echo from above as James watches body after body plummet past.
“District B13’s” Cyril Raffaelli and David Belle perform parkour stunts that find them careening off walls like golf balls in a clothes dryer. Then 56-year-old Liam Neeson did some of his own action work in “Taken,” but Travolta is strictly from the Steven Seagal school. Watch the ultra-slow motion camera moves and unnecessary edits when JT talks on an Asian street gang. The guy can barely lift his leg, let alone kickbox.
Without giving too much more away, the simple plot and even simpler treatment of terrorism should help to make this No. 1 at the box office.