Eye Candy #408 - "From Paris With Love"

From Paris With Love:  This film was given short-shrift by the critics, but frankly, for a half-brainer action movie (not a no-brainer, because there is a fairly intricate little through-line to follow), it’s not half-bad.  I would daresay…”enjoyable”.   Think of it as “Training Day”.  For spies.  On smack.  Jonathan Rhys Meyers is James Reese, a low-level intelligence functionary stationed at the US embassy in Paris.  His greatest desire is to be come a full field agent.  Well, he gets his wish when he is assigned a partner: Charlie Wax (John Travolta, in a nice scenery-chewing role), a special operative in Paris on a mission that becomes more and more involved and destructive the longer Charlie is on the ground, involving drug dealers, terrorists, Asian criminal gangs, betrayal, a high body count, and so forth.  At 92 minutes, it rushes along at a very fast clip, no effort wasted.  If only other action movies were so thoughtful.   Not the greatest action movie, but certainly a laudable recent effort and loads better than a lot of the drek I’ve seen.   The director, Pierre Morel, gave us the also entertaining “Taken” and “District 13“, so he knows how to stage some stylish violence.  I imagine that this film will enjoy similar success on DVD.  This is a solid 3-1/2 stars out of 5.  Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”