John Travolta's Larger Than Life Turn in the Training Day Knock-Off From Paris With Love is Tremendously Fun. It's Too Bad It's So Racist!
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I have vague memories of watching and reviewing 2010’s From Paris With Love for The A.V Club when it was released. I dimly recall it being yet another Taken knock-off. That’s understandable, considering it was directed by Taken’s Pierre Morel from a story by Luc Besson, who similarly dreamed up Taken’s premise.
It turns out that From Paris With Love is not, in fact, one of the many vehicles for action stars of a certain age that nakedly rips off Taken but it’s wildly derivative all the same. Only instead of ripping off its director’s biggest, most influential triumph it shamelessly steals from Training Day.
The elevator pitch for From Paris With Love seems to be “Training Day in Paris with John Travolta.” For a solid hour that turns out to be a winning formula. Then the agreeably schlocky thriller ups its racism game from glaring to unbearable and the guilt to pleasure ratio becomes impossibly high. It’s hard to enjoy the third act with a clear conscience unless you’re some manner of Nazi soccer hooligan.
From Paris With Love unconscionably makes audiences wait nearly twenty minutes for the introduction of Travolta’s Charlie Wax. When we first encounter the veteran super-spy, he’s being held at customs for refusing to part with his beloved energy drinks.
You might imagine that a world-class spy like Wax would go out of his way to be inconspicuous, to move silently through the world without attracting undue attention. That’s not how Charlie Boy operates, however.
Charlie goes out of his way to be as conspicuous and obnoxious as possible. He’s part Denzel Washington in Training Day and part “Diamond” David Lee Roth on a coke binge in the mid 1980s with a whole lot of John Travolta mixed in.
Liberated from an endless succession of wigs, toupees and hair plugs, the bald, sleek and ferocious Travolta puts on a master class in showboating movie star charisma.
Watching all seven movies Bruce Willis released last year for my Talking About Bruno project made me appreciate Travolta’s performance even more.
Willis, who is costarring in Travolta’s next movie, Paradise City, could not be more checked out in his late-period vehicles, for what turn out to be very understandable, legitimate reasons, but Travolta brings his A game to From Paris With Love. In every scene he gives one hundred percent…OR MORE! That’s mathematically impossible yet during the half hour or so his character spends hanging out the window of a car with a rocket launcher on his shoulder it’s impossible to deny that the Gotti star is giving, at the very least, 120 to 125 percent.
A deeply underwhelming Jonathan Rhys Meyers costars as James Reese, an ambitious CIA agent who is also the personal assistant to a powerful US ambassador. The clean-cut young man also has, in Kasia Smutniak’s Caroline, a gorgeous French girlfriend so improbably perfect that it’s inevitable that she will either be brutally murdered as a cynical plot point or turn out to be something different and darker (and MUSLIM!) than she initially appears, which is even more cynical, not to mention Islamophobic.
James is given the unenviable job of working as Charlie Wax’s driver and partner while he’s in Paris. Like Denzel Washington in Training Day, Charlie Wax sees it as his professional duty to fuck with the younger man as relentlessly as possible. The deranged mentor even tricks his straight arrow partner into consuming hard drugs, only in this case it’s some of the cocaine they’re carrying around in a vase rather than PCP.
Wax may be a hotshot lawman but he behaves for all the world like a batshit insane career criminal who would just as soon pump strangers full of bullets than talk to them. King Kong has nothing on him!
A wildly over-matched Meyer doesn’t act here so much as he reacts to the crazy tornado of wild, vulgar energy that is Travolta’s memorable performance.
Throughout From Paris With Love I waited patiently for the inevitable reveal that Charlie Wax is, in fact, the bad guy. How could he not be? The dude doesn’t just kill some bad guys: he MURDERS FRANCE.
There are maybe twelve people left in Paris when our “hero” finishes his killing spree. Needless to say, they’re all white. By the end of From Paris With Love, Charlie has personally killed more people than the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001.
Forget having a license to kill: Charlie Wax seems to have a license to commit genocide. If Travolta were paid per kill, he’d take home at least twice as much as the twenty million he made for The Taking of the Pelham 123. And he’d earn it! The wild theatricality that made his performance in The Taking of Pelham 123 such a headache is enormous fun here.
Charlie Wax kills all of these people with a mile-wide grin and a playful glimmer in his eyes that silently but powerfully conveys, “Oh my God. I fucking love killing people! It’s the best.”
Charlie Wax seems energized by mass murder. If you or I killed someone it would be the defining moment of our lives. If Charlie Wax kills twenty people in the morning and thirty in the afternoon he just considers it a typical Tuesday.
I imagine that there are multiple drafts of From Paris With Love where Charlie Wax turns out to be the super-villain he appears to be all along. It’s an operatically villainous performance yet the film affords Travolta the best of both worlds: he gets to go big and crazy and murderous like a super-villain while inexplicably remaining the good guy.
That’s because in a disgustingly xenophobic third act we learn who the true villain is: Islam. James’ girlfriend seems too good to be true because she IS too good to be true. Six years earlier she met a man, a MUSLIM man who seduced her into becoming a double agent and a suicide bomber.
From Paris With Love takes a hard right turn in its third act into blatant racism and fear-mongering. It becomes a horror movie where the monster is the radical Islam. At that point From Paris With Love stops being fun.
Not even John Travolta with a freaking rocket launcher can redeem a movie about the evils of women and the dangerous duplicity of non-Christians.
From Paris With Love begins blandly and ends hatefully but for a good fifty minutes or so it’s an enjoyably deranged romp anchored by a spectacularly entertaining star turn by Travolta.
From Paris With Love reminded me why I chose to spend years watching and writing about all of Travolta’s movies despite his richly merited reputation as someone who consistently makes some of the most egregious stinkers of the last fifty years.
Travolta is having a ton of fun here. His delight in going way over the top is infectious, if not quite enough to save the movie from its worst, ugliest and most bigoted instincts.
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