"From Paris With Love" Review

The trailers for From Paris With Love, the follow-up to director Pierre Morel's bad-ass Liam Neeson revenge flick Taken promised a wild and crazy (and bald) John Travolta cutting a swath of mayhem across Paris while being chaperoned by low-level embassy lackey Jonathan Rhys Meyers - sort of The Odd Couple meets a John Woo movie. While there are moments, it ultimately falls flat like a disturbed souffle.

The basic problem with FPWL is that the story by Luc Besson is wafer thin and not particularly engaging. In Taken, we had Liam Neeson's driven father killing everyone that stood between him and his daughter - an understandable motivation - but here we follow Travolta's hitter and Meyer's freaked-out sidekick from one underworld location to the next without knowing where we're going and what's really happening. It's as if the makers hoped that Travolta's splashy performances - he hasn't been this manic since he was Nicolas Cage in Face/Off - and clockwork gunfights would keep us awake. It doesn't and that's a shame; it looked like dumb fun.

Score: 5/10 - Catch it on cable.

It's also kind of cheap looking; when an explosives-laden Volvo is popped with a bazooka, the resulting blast is inexcusable puny - most TV shows do much, much better, like on Desperate Housewives.