From Paris With Love
James Scott rating: ***
Imdb.com rating: 6.6/10
Rated R for strong bloody violence throughout, drug content, pervasive language and brief sexuality.

“The French are cowards,” my 11-year-old reported very matter-of-factly as From Paris With Love began. I wondered, did his pronouncement include the partisans who risked all to fight the Nazis, or Napoleon and his Grand Armee who stormed most of Europe, or Joan, the Maid of Orleans, who endured not only battle but torture and being burned alive for her convictions? “Cowards,” indeed.

“Stupid” might be a different matter. Clinging to old-world military strategies, France felt secure during World War II behind the Maginot Line, which was fairly easily circumvented by German tactics. It’s the same kind of “stupid” the United States has practiced ever since 9/11 in the belief that wasting our blood and fortune against barbarians in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan is going to make us safe from terrorists who are plotting in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan and the ancient capital cities of Europe. It’s the inability to let go of old-think in favor of new-think.

All this forms the basis of From Paris With Love, which finds young consular adjutant James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, best known for the BBC’s The Tudors) treading water as a minor bureaucrat, dreaming of a more substantive espionage role. He gets his wish when he’s assigned to partner up with CIA assassin Charlie Wax (John Travolta), in Paris on a convoluted mission of mayhem which leads them from Chinese heroin smugglers to Islamo-fascist terrorists, with the bewildered Reese (not to mention the audience) always about three steps behind Wax.

Directed by Pierre Morel (Taken) from a story by Luc Besson (arguably France’s most prolific and internationally successful filmmaker), From Paris With Love at its heart more closely resembles The In-Laws (1979 or 2003 version) than anything else, with a twist that any filmgoer will see coming reels away, but which Reese naively doesn’t suspect, even after he’s slapped in the face with it. I won’t say that such naivete doesn’t reflect the real world, but it’s demonstrative evidence that Reese isn’t ready, at least initially, to join Wax’s shadowy realm.

From Paris With Love isn’t as expensive or polished as Taken, and Travolta, beloved as he is by the American audience, strains too hard in his role. For his part, Rhys Meyers achieves the right balance, at least until forced to deliver some insipid climactic dialogue. But the film ultimately fails, not because of any of those things, but because it’s not possible, at least at this point in history, to amuse Americans with a funny spy comedy about the war against Islamic terrorists. James Cameron got away with it in True Lies, but that was pre-9/11. It’s as big a miscalculation as believing hardened concrete bunkers were going to stop the Luftwaffe.