Judgement of Paris

From Paris with Love showed real promise: an action comedy buddy film written and produced by Luc Besson, directed by Pierre Morel of District B13, set in Paris, with John Travolta as the tough guy and John Rhys Meyers as prissy partner. It actually works pretty well - at first!

Meyers is the secretary for the American ambassador to France. It is established that he is meticulous, has a lovely exotic girlfriend, and is dabbling in espionage. His spy-bosses instruct him to help get Travolta into the country and take him around. Travolta is an ugly America, with a bald head and goatee, a leather jacket, and a potty mouth. But do his provocations conceal a deeper purpose?

Yeah, of course. Travolta has bulked up a lot as well as shaving his head for this. He looks more like Jess Ventura - but he still sounds like Vinnie Barbarino. That tenor is just not so tough.

I'm pretty sure you can write the first hour of the script yourself: Travolta does something inappropriate, Meyers is mortified. Big fight scene. It turns out that Travolta was really exposing some criminals, Meyers is impressed. Big fight scene. Travolta makes Meyers do something ridiculous (carry around a large Chinese vase full of cocaine), and it turns out really useful. Big car chase scene. And so on.

But toward the end, the stakes get higher, and the action gets more serious. I'll leave out the spoilers, except to say that the action gets more serious, but the movie never does. They do some awful things and never really acknowledge it. In the end, Travolta and Meyers both seem totally unsympathetic, and we kind of hate Besson and director Morel as well.

In conclusion, this just made me want to watch a good action movie set in Paris, so Ronin has been queued up.