From Paris With Love

How quaint: an R-rated movie for the person you were before you were old enough to get in to R-rated movies. Director Pierre Morel’s glib, cocaine-clouded cartoon blood bath is a throwback to a time when all an action thriller had to do was dispense with menacing minorities by the dozen, and all an American in Paris had to do was bed the willing women and remind the men who saved who in World War II. Adi Hasak’s screenplay credit notwithstanding, this quite clearly originates from a story by Luc Besson, and, in the self-conscious Eurotrash tradition of other Besson-Morel pairings such as District B13 and Taken, amounts to just another ass-kicking, bomb-ticking, buddy-flicking potboiler. As the trigger-happy Tweedledum to Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ trigger-shy Tweedledee, John Travolta imitates Vin Diesel imitating Bruce Willis.