From Paris with Love ( * )

February 4, 2010 11:18 a.m. EST

United States (CNS) - 95 minutes

In theaters February 5, 2010

Rating: R, Thriller

Sounds like a romance flick. Isn't, not by a long shot. Moreover, love has absolutely nothing to do with either the movie itself or our feelings about it.

Consider this review of From Paris with Love a package delivered. With hate.

The oddly titled thriller is a slightly comedic crime flick, a bullet-riddled actioner that at first seems specifically titled to suggest the James Bond catalog (From Russia with Love), and thereafter designed to recall Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson driving around talking about ordering fast food in the City of Light. And sure enough, all of a sudden, out comes a "Royale with Cheese."

The very same Travolta stars in FPWL as Charlie Wax, a wiseacre loose cannon of a CIA agent -- not only impossibly resourceful but seemingly bulletproof -- who's on some kind of mission that we never quite get a full explanation of.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers co-stars as his odd-couple sidekick, James Reese, a straight-laced personal aide to the American Ambassador in Paris who is also, it just so happens, a low-level operative for the CIA who wants badly to be a special agent himself.

When mild-mannered James is offered his first senior-level assignment -- to help ward off a terrorist attack -- he's partnered with motormouth Charlie.

Together, the odd couple -- one trigger-happy, the other trigger-sad -- travels through the Parisian underworld, unerringly mowing down apparently nearsighted bad guys as only the heroes in a bad action movie can manage.

Pierre Morel, who also directed Taken and District 13, remains in breathless-pacing, off-the-charts-improbable mode, working from a high-body-count story by Luc Besson that banishes character and story to the back seat, and a divorced-from-reality screenplay by Adi Hasak that features dialogue exploding with expletives that's more wooden than any forest.

Idiotic gunfights, endless car chases, and gratuitous incendiary explosions abound: credibility is lacking to an intelligence-insulting degree.

At times, it's difficult to tell whether this is a movie that will inevitably "inspire" a copycat videogame, or whether the movie already is the videogame. That is one thin membrance separating those two items.

Whereas Taken, which also emerged from a Luc Besson story idea, had an urgency and emotional grounding -- a father's no-holds-barred concern for his daughter -- that enhanced the narrative momentum and allowed us to ignore or forgive the contradictions, FPWL relies on its comedic tone to escort us past the improbabilities. Nice try but: no, our rooting interest just isn't there.

The nonsensical plot exists merely as a clothesline on which to hang a progression of ho-hum, high-energy, low-impact action skirmishes.

John and Jon are mismatched in more ways than one. Travolta, bald, goateed, and earringed, seems to be having a good time letting loose and hamming it up, bringing only his charisma to the party because nothing else is called for. Opposite him, sleepwalking Rhys Meyers reverts to his tendency to pose and model instead of act.

The bumbling buddy shoot-em-up, From Paris with Love, comes from the folks who brought you Taken.  Consider it Mistaken.