Review

Review Date: 7-February-10
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Junk

From Paris with Love (2010)

John Travolta probably owns sports cars and other expensive toys and has women slipping him phone numbers on a regular basis. So what does a movie star like him do when suffering a mid-life crisis? Perhaps the prospect of decline is what drove him to From Paris with Love. Though horribly written, this would-be thriller does allow him to pretend that he is super-virile, indestructible, and in charge of his own destiny. As a government operative sent to Paris to take down a terrorist cell, Travolta is a strutting catalog of all the traits that make Americans hated overseas. He is loud, crude, bigoted, gun-crazy, arrogant, and addicted to Big Macs. These qualities are emphasized by contrast with his rookie partner (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a secretary to the U.S. ambassador (thus tactful and Europeanized) who has long dreamed of becoming a spy. Within minutes of Travolta's arrival, the two are knee-deep in blood, bullets, drugs, and shifty-eyed foreigners. They pause in their mission only long enough for Travolta to bang a hooker, and before the day is over he brags that he has killed an average of a man per hour.

The punchline to this joke of a movie is that it was made by Frenchmen, apparently enamored of the brazen violence of their Yankee hero. Would that their admiration had inspired a better picture, although I cannot imagine Travolta's character shining in any setting. When the rookie is not skulking behind Captain Testosterone in open-mouthed amazement, he is mooning over his girlfriend (Kasia Smutniak) and wondering how their relationship will survive his new career. The laughably "dramatic" ending, following Travolta's gratuitous outing with a bazooka, reveals that love cannot survive in our cruel world. I am not sure why the filmmakers think their audience would care, since their hero's existence proves that romance is for pussies and real men are devoted solely to their rods.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.