Jeff Simon review: 'From Paris with Love' is an explosive journey

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Ancient journalistic law: Names make news.

For the time being, set aside the names of the stars of the newest trans-Atlantic shoot-em-up "From Paris With Love." Jonathan Rhys Meyers, frankly, scarcely matters at all (he spends most of this film's length as its Ryan Seacrest) and John Travolta is cannily exploited for everything he's worth.

The names to take to heart are French and hardly household words: Luc Besson, the director/producer and by now a slam-bang brand name in international action movies whose early films "La Femme Nikita" and "Subway" gave us a brand new way for French filmmakers to out-American the Americans; and Pierre Morel, the French director who was Besson's man on the brutally effective trans-Atlantic revenge thriller "Taken" (in which, yes, Liam Neeson, through sheer height and acting chops turned out to be exemplary at action thuggery).

"From Paris with Love" is their movie — a bullet and TNT and fisticuffs fiesta whose operant principal is "speak softly (and only when you absolutely have to) and carry the biggest gun in five square miles."

Until Travolta, in fact, shows up with his head shaved and beaming .357 caliber and smiles at everyone, it not only isn't much of a movie, but its set up practically screams from the beginning who's going to turn out to be kosher and who isn't.

Rhys Meyers isn't much more than an embassy gofer with a minor talent for chess and a beauteous French girlfriend of uncertain ancestry who wants a lot more of his time and attention. Travolta is the cueball mega-thug American from across the sea whose job it is to shoot first, as much as possible, and leave the asking of questions to others. (Like, say, his Seacrest-type partner who upholds the virtues of law and order and polite Western procedure. An episode of "24" would, no doubt, have set him straight, but in a spy shoot-em-up like this, nobody watches spy shoot-em-ups.)

Travolta's emergence as a committed bullet-sprayer and bare-knuckle bruiser began with Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" and has given him a very viable career when nothing else was working all that well. Heaven knows it does so here, where there's even a line paying tribute to his role in "Pulp Fiction" by having him chow down between slaughters on a "Royale With Cheese" (which "Pulp" people know to be the French nickname for Big Macs).

The reason Besson and Morel continue to be the names to pay attention to here is how nasty this film is — a la "Taken" — about just about everyone who's a French civilian. All our boys encounter are drug dealers, thugs and Middle Eastern mega-spies. Clearly, Besson and Morel are enemies of the French chamber of commerce.

They do make enjoyable movies, though, as long as you realize that every "surprise" in the movie by film's end was obvious almost 10 minutes into the film.

Just sit back and watch the TNT, bullets and fists. A low form of movie edification, no doubt, but certainly a real one.

jsimon@buffnews.com

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