It's 3 p.m. on a Saturday, and I'm lying on the floor still in my pajamas.
One way to look at that is I can't afford furniture or any pants that have progressed past drawstring technology.
Another way to look at it is as a pretty sweet job perk. What I like even better than the slovenliness this affords me, though, is that over the course of watching 75-odd new releases a year, you get exposed to a lot of debut directors and can expect to (have to) see whatever they come out with next. If I liked Taken and you'd have to be a fool not to, Liam Neeson chopped some serious throats I could end up following its director for years.
-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.
It's all the fun of having kids, but you only have to see them every year or two. Also like kids, sometimes newish directors fall down. Director Pierre Morel's followup to Taken, From Paris with Love is far too much of a blast to be considered a face-skinning sprawl, but it's also too disjointed to get all that worked up about.
As the assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to France, Jonathan Rhys Meyers moonlights as a low-level special operative. He's ambitious, though, and once he proves he's ready for the next level, a call comes in with his next job: to partner up with the wild but effective John Travolta.
Their mission, according to Travolta, is to crack one of Paris' drug rings. But as the bodies add up, his story doesn't, and Meyers soon finds himself on the hunt for a terrorist cell readying an attack on the city.
Morel's Taken was a treat for two types of fans who rarely overlap: those who appreciated the realistic application of martial arts, and those who enjoyed the paranoid parental anxiety-fantasies where their children are sold into sex slavery. Also anyone who just like watching asses get kicked. Clearly, Morel brought a lot to the table.
He impresses much of his particular stamp on From Paris with Love, too. Problem is, it's kind of all over the place.
No doubt it's fun. From about five minutes after he hits the screen, Travolta starts killing so many drug dealers the world's underfunded public schools will have to fail overtime to replace them. The rapid-fire action sequences sit somewhere between flashy choreography and the immediately of the shaky-cam style popularized by the Bourne films. Travolta's cannon is so loose that sailors are leaping face-first into the briny deep rather than risk being crushed under its careering wheels.
Thing is, it's not exactly believable. It exists in that alternate cinematic universe where one hero repeatedly slaughters whole legions of enemy goons. In that universe, when he's shot back, it's always in the shoulder. The police, if they show up at all, appear when he's already screeching away. It's a consequence-free world.
Is that in itself a problem? Hell no. Do you know how many people you can shoot in a consequence-free world? All the people. I don't have to explain how awesome that is.
From Paris with Love runs into trouble when its woohoo, bang-bang world takes a radical swerve for the serious in its third act. It's a jarring shift in tone that suddenly wants its crazy story to mean something.
Its breathless pacing was already kinda confusing in terms of "OK, now why are they shooting all these guys?" As for Travolta and Meyers' buddy cop dynamic, it works, but it's still a formula. Put that tonal leap on top of it, and you end up with a movie that, however fun it may be, is struggling in too many different directions at the same time.
Grade: C+
