Sporting a Charlie Brown head of perfect bald round ness and a dangly earring, John Travolta’s “From Paris With Love” assassin/ superagent Charlie Wax is the master of whatever the opposite of wisecracking is. Fooljoshing? Lametalking? Flatlining?
Asked how many more E-Z Slay villains he expects to present themselves for mowing down, Travolta says, “My sense? About a billion.” A cache of weapons inspires him to say, “Ooh, come to Daddy.” Providing an explosive finish to one villain’s career, he exclaims, “Welcome to Paris, baby!” And upon dispatching some Chinese coke dealers, Wax requests the relay of a quip to their boss: “I got a message for him: Wax on, wax off.”
The line is so inept that Travolta spends part of the next scene explaining why we should think it’s funny. Basic rule of one-liners: They shouldn’t take eight additional lines to explain. There’s no footnoting in repartee.
Tasked with becoming his partner in action-manhood is Reese, a chess-playing American desk jockey at the US embassy in Paris. Reese longs for a promotion but has never done any fieldwork more advanced than using chewing gum to plant a listening device in a French official’s office. He is played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, doing a sort of nerd-thug American accent that falls uneasily between Pacino and Urkel.
This fop — all David Niven mustache and Eton bearing — is said to be from East New York. It’s the only line in the script that’s funny, albeit unintentionally.
After a few scenes with Wax, Reese becomes an expert gunman but remains a sidekick who is neither comic relief nor an equal partner nor even a device for Wax to fully explain to him and the audience what’s going on. His main purpose is to lug around a 2-foot-tall Chinese vase full of cocaine, leading to improbable scenes such as the one in which baddies divest him of his flea-market ring but fail to notice he’s holding several keys of uncut blow.
The director is Pierre Morel, whose similarly misshapen and frantic “Taken” proved last year that audiences are so starved for an action movie in which the bad guys are Muslims that they’ll overlook all other flaws. Wax keeps marching into drug dens and mannequin factories and brothels to gun down heavily armed gangsters by the dozen. If his mission is so vast and important, why is he the only guy the US sent? Why has he been saddled with an entirely inexperienced partner? War-on-terror budget equals one pro killer, one intern?
Morel’s strategy is to speed up the stupid and hope no one cares. So you can sneak a gun onto an airplane by concealing it in . . . a can of energy drink? A villain tries to kill a US official by ramming into her from the wrong way on a highway, even though her car is protected by a large motorcade and he has a bomb planted at the meeting to which she’s heading. Jobs that should be easy (like tracing a call placed from an ordinary pay phone) prove impossible, while the impossible (like finding a car in a few minutes based on the guess that it is probably on or near a highway in the greater Paris region) proves simple.
The scene in which we learn that Wax is pursuing not a bad coke shipment but Pakistani Muslim terrorists is played with muddled, hazy sound because Reese, who is listening to the story, is so cocaine-frazzled that he can’t focus. The message to the audience is: We’ll spare you the details, but just remember there are some Muslims who need to get Waxed.
The single tiny twist, which arrives an hour or so into the movie but 55 minutes after the average attentive viewer will have guessed it, matters only because Wax, so ruthless in every other scene, is seemingly under orders to be lax for a while and allow things to stretch out. Otherwise, the movie illustrates how boring it is to deliver all screech and no suspense, takedown without buildup, pure slam, bam, merci madame.