From Paris With Love

Starring John Travolta, Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Directed by Pierre Morel. R16.

The slaughterhouse mentality of the maelstrom of mayhem that is From Paris From Love will challenge movie-watching body counting.

While the title recalls From Russia with Love (1963), this is no slick Bond-style espionage thriller, but a relentless killing machine featuring a super agent who's more Rambo than 007.

John Travolta seems to have stepped out of one psycho role in The Taking of Pelham 123 into another without changing character, only switching sides from ruthless villain to merciless good guy ... well, an American Government agent.

His Charlie Wax, who believes in shooting first and worrying about questions later, arrives in Paris on some vaguely rendered assignment having to do with drugs and terrorists. Teaming up with Wax is low-level secret agent James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who is getting his first chance to work at special ops level. 

Leaving behind his French girlfriend (Kasia Smutniak), he quickly finds himself in the midst of  chaos, carnage and corpses.

Rhys Meyers has little more to do than look dazed and confused, while Travolta chews up scenery and revels in violence.

Director Pierre Morel (Taken) gives the action plenty of frenetic zip and shows an occasional sense of black humour (bodies falling down a stairwell one at a time). But there's also an odious whiff of xenophobia here:  Wax delivers an early obnoxious rant against the French, which, it turns out afterwards, was just a ruse but no doubt will still please anti-French Americans.

Wax also shrugs off the massacre of a score or more of drug-dealing Asians by merrily quipping that there's still a billion more of them left.

At the same time this murderous nutcase has a secret love of the song Close to You and in a reminder of Travolta's character Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction a craving for McDonald's royale with cheese, which turns out to be an appropriate favourite food in the context of a movie, like the generally better Transporter films, which is supersized movie junk food for action movie junkies.

- © Fairfax NZ News