From Paris with Love (2010)

From Paris with Love arrives in 2010 with a screenplay co-written by Luc Besson and a director, Pierre Morel, fresh from the efficient brutalities of Taken. John Travolta plays Charlie Wax, a field agent who smuggles his sidearm through French customs inside energy drink cans and insults the customs officers for sport. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays James Reese, an embassy aide with a desk job and a longing for the field. The two men shoot their way through a Triad drug ring, a warehouse, and a summit meeting. At no point does the film pause to instruct us on how to live.

The inventory is short, because the picture touches on charged material without ever adopting a position on it. The villains are Triad gangsters and Pakistani terrorists who plan to infiltrate the embassy beneath burkas. The female lead, Caroline, is a sleeper agent and a femme fatale who is ultimately shot by the man who loves her. A critic at the time called the film racist, which is an accusation about lazy stereotyping, not evidence of racial consciousness. There is no environmental theme, no economic critique, no body-diversity messaging, no neurodivergent character, and no historical revision. The film is interested in firepower and in the chemistry between a loose cannon and his handler.

What remains is a period artifact of the pre-streaming action economy, budgeted at fifty-two million dollars and returned at roughly break-even, with a Rotten Tomatoes score that hovers in the high thirties. Its only agenda is the placement of a Desert Eagle into a newly hardened hand, and the promise, never fulfilled, of sequels in London and Prague. We classify it accordingly, and we move on.