From Paris with Love

‘His playbook may be a bit unorthodox but he gets things done!’ The most recycled snippet of dialogue in the maverick-cop genre is rolled out to honour the dubious methods of lead-sheddin’, gack-snorting FBI wildman, Charlie Wax (John Travolta). Looking like Fu-Manchu in surplus combat gear and not so much chewing the scenery as using it for target practice, he’s teamed with preppy, pencil-pushing office bod James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) to take down a Parisian drug cartel as quickly and violently as possible.

With the story swiftly descending into a series of spuriously linked encounters in which the pair find themselves terrorised by many different ethnic minorities, the film is best when examining the unexpected chemistry between its unlikely leads. Cinematographer-turned-director Pierre Morel (‘Taken’) composes the action sequences with the balletic sheen of Hong Kong-era John Woo, but it’s not enough to allow the film to rise above its guilty-until-proven-innocent conception of justice. Reprehensible, then, but what fun!