Mr. Beaks Grants Pierre Morel's FROM PARIS WITH LOVE Diplomatic Immunity!
For the second year in a row, director Pierre Morel will treat U.S. moviegoers to a pre-Super Bowl bloodbath set in Paris, France. This should become a tradition.
And it could - with or without Morel, because the undeniable, pulsatingly gaudy sensibility behind last year's TAKEN and this year's FROM PARIS WITH LOVE is Euro-Bruckheimer himself, Luc Besson. Ever since he acquired a taste for the high-gloss nonsense of American action movies with his empty-headed LA FEMME NIKITA, Besson has been a prolific and enthusiastic provider of studio-slick product to the worldwide market. He flirted with respectability for a moment as a director in the '90s (with the miraculously great LEON and the migraine-inducingly awful THE MESSENGER: THE STORY OF JOAN OF ARC), but ultimately threw his creative energies into producing really stupid movies like TAXI, KISS OF THE DRAGON, THE TRANSPORTER and so on. This may sound insulting, but it's not; I happen to like really stupid movies when they're slapped together with some degree of craft and/or sincerity, so there's a part of me that admires Besson's high standards when it comes to churning out shit.
FROM PARIS WITH LOVE is as junky and moronic as any piece of refuse in the Besson canon, but, for some, it's viewed as a cut above owing to the involvement of Morel, who did a fine job of managing the parkour mayhem in DISTRICT B13, and capably guided Liam Neeson through the righteous dispatching of many a slave-trading henchman in TAKEN. Suddenly, there's a burgeoning belief that Morel is something more than just a steady hand behind the camera, that he might be the next John Woo, if not better (which would make him the next Sam Peckinpah).
Though it may not be apparent from the trailers and commercials (which wisely play up the wild third-act freeway chase), FROM PARIS WITH LOVE is more thematically ambitious than anything Morel's attempted before; once you get past the whizzing bullets and John Travolta's best Nicolas Cage performance since FACE/OFF, it's a tough-minded film about what it takes to effectively prosecute the War on Terror. And this isn't smuggled-in commentary: it's delivered at point-blank range. To defeat the enemy, you must think and behave like the enemy. Anything less could mean the end of civilization as we know it.
Johnathan Rhys Myers stars as James Reese, the wet-behind-the-ears CIA recruit pulling double duty as an assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to France. As the film begins, he's still proving his worth to the agency by performing minor errands (e.g. the placing of a bug in another diplomat's office). This setup is necessary in that it establishes the humdrum life of a low-level spook, but it also gets the film off to a listless start. Morel and screenwriter Adi Hasak are clearly looking to establish Reese as a sympathetic protagonist in these scenes (particularly those with his lovely fiancee), but they fail because they hold him, and his naive worldview, in contempt. Spying is just a chess match for Reese; he doesn't understand the stakes, and, as a result, innocent people could be put at risk. This isn't explicitly stated by Morel and Hasak, but he's such a cocky little shit, we're eager to see him get fucked up.
Enter Travolta's Charlie Wax, a cartoon-character badass who speaks in authentic 1980s Hollywood ghetto-ese (he says "motherfucker" a lot) and gleefully flouts international law. Wax is supposed to be Reese's partner, but, as they plunge headlong into their "job" (something to do with Pakistani drug dealers/terrorists; only their race is important), the relationship quickly turns into one of teacher-student. The hope here is that we're constantly uncertain as to Wax's intent: is he an ends-justifiy-the-means savior ala 24's Jack Bauer or just a corrupt monster like Alonzo in TRAINING DAY (which FROM PARIS WITH LOVE shamelessly apes in the early going)? Hasak tries to throw us off by having Wax hoover up some stolen cocaine, but he's at least a man who gets things done, which makes him far more likable than the spineless, by-the-book Reese. He had us at "motherfucker".
The film's shopworn story mechanics would be excusable if the action set pieces were more inventively staged, but they're only competent (or, in the case of an intended-to-be-humorous stairwell shootout, clumsy) until the film takes a serious turn late in the second act. Once the movie has a purpose (as TAKEN did throughout), Morel switches on and gives us a car chase that's worthy of second-unit maestro Dan Bradley - and it's not a coincidence that this smashingly effective sequence goes down while Reese is in another part of Paris. Though it takes us a few scenes to adjust to his histrionics (largely because the film is a lethargic snooze until he appears), Wax is the show. He's also the by-any-means-necessary conscience of the film. He doesn't imprison or interrogate. He acts. And he's always right.
This murderous certitude is straight-up right-wing horseshit plucked straight from the Bronson age, but Morel shovels it with just enough panache that you don't mind; it's all harmlessly cathartic so long as you leave your bloodlust in the theater. The Woo comparisons may be bunk, but I'll happily entertain the notion that he's the new Michael Winner - who'd also be an odd choice to direct DUNE. Not that I really care who fucks up Frank Herbert next. I just want to know who Besson's sending over with the red meat next Super Bowl weekend.
