From Paris With Love

*Spoiler Alert*



James Reese is a low level C.I.A operative and would love nothing more then to become a special agent. Reese gets his chance when he is asked to help out special agent Charlie Wax. Reese must drive Wax wherever he needs to go, and make sure that Wax is able to stop a terror cell before it is too late. Reese has more then he bargained for while working with Wax, but if he can get the job done and clear his name in 48 hours he may just get the promotion he always wanted.

It is clear to see why people like this film. Travolta is witty, Wax is over the top and attempts to be a badass all the while maintaining this likeable down to earth quality. Wax is not the typical C.I.A agent, snorting cocaine, waving guns and shooting anyone that stands in his way. That is the way the character appears to anyone who just took this film for entertainment purposes (which is not a bad thing). Perhaps I just find that they cannot create unique characters anymore, Wax is just a mix of all of the wall agents that have been created in the past. His live-by-my-own rules method has been used before, plenty of times, and will continue to be used in future films about characters of the same nature. Wax is just another agent who swears and bends the rules a little too often and at entertainment value I guess that is somewhat pleasing.

From Paris with Love tries to have awkward comedic moments between the confident Wax and the nervous James Reese. They would have worked had From Paris with Love been an action comedy. Yet somehow they managed to add really interesting comedy with what was supposed to be really intense drama and it just does not work. With a film there has to be a boundary where the comedy or the drama becomes the primary genre. Yes we have all watched those overly awkward dramatic scenes that are meant to carry some comedy in them as well. But a film is supposed to make you feel something, it is supposed to target a central emotion (by no means I am telling people how they should feel, because we all come out of a certain film feeling differently) but each film has an intended emotion on which it builds the foundation of its story. A comedy film is not supposed to make us feel sad and drama most likely is not intending to make us feel happy. With From Paris with Love it is tough to tell which one they wanted to be the focus, because even the ending was almost bitter-sweet. Most Hollywood directors have yet to find the perfect balance (outside of the romantic comedy genre that is). I am excited to see the first dramatic-comedy action that finds the perfect balance; it will surely be a crowd pleaser.

Jonathan Rhys Myers did little to help the film at all. His character of James Reese was a hopeless romantic who was oblivious to his dangerous surroundings. Reese was supposed to be an intelligent man and there was no real evidence of that in the film. Perhaps that does not fall entirely on Rhys Meyers but his acting did not help out the character at all. Reese wanted to be a big shot without actually having to do the big shot work. There is nothing valuable in that type of character. The worst thing of all was how Wax kept insinuating that romance would be the death of Reese and it turned out to be his girlfriend that was setting him up for information. Which at this point Reese gets this new found ability to shot and stand up for himself killing the one person he supposedly cared for the most. Should it not have been more difficult then just not being able to talk it out? Most people would have been frozen and at any other moment in the film he would not have been able to pull the trigger.

From Paris with Love is entertaining if that is all you take it as. By far not a bad film, just a film with faults like any other.


6/10