Directed by Pierre Morel
(R)
**
A mismatched pair of American agents fights off terrorism in Paris.
The “only love in From Paris With Love blossoms between two white men” and their guns, said Rafer Guzman in Newsday. These men—John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers—are government agents who join forces for an anti-terrorism assignment in Paris. Travolta plays a trigger-happy intelligence ace, while Rhys Meyers is a U.S. Embassy desk jockey who’s looking to get in on the action. The two buffoons certainly encounter plenty of action in director Pierre Morel’s nonsensical thriller, said Wesley Morris in The Boston Globe. In fact, From Paris With Love is less a film than a “collection of explosions and shoot-outs duct-taped to a terrorism plot.” Morel may have transformed Liam Neeson into a legitimate action star in 2008’s Taken, but here his bad jokes and crushingly banal dialogue turn Travolta into the “illegitimate child of Freddie Mercury and Charles Barkley.” At least Travolta seems like he’s “having a blast,” said Oliver Jones in People. As he tosses guys down stairwells and makes Pulp Fiction references, his enthusiasm helps sell this “testosterone-soaked trifle.”
