From Paris With Love

I'm the first to admit that I'm a fan of violence in movies. I remember the fallout in Hollywood after David Fincher's "Fight Club" (1999) that limited violence in mainstream movies for about three years. Those were some sad years. But I'm also sensitive to violence when it's served up as an obvious attempt at legitimizing prejudices and promoting a reckless approach for already trigger-happy civil servants to follow.

John Travolta's Wax represents everything that foreigners abhor about the American male identity. Wax is a big mouth badass who grooves on his own fast-twitch instability to do a renegade job of crime-fighting. Reese figures that Wax kills about one person every hour that they are together. The actual figure is much higher. Wax is a self-reflexive post-modern stereotype derived all too loosely from his much hipper Vincent in "Pulp Fiction," and lesser so from his FBI agent in John Woo's "Face/Off" (1997). With a shaved head and a carefully manicured goatee, Wax is killing machine whose ruthlessness is cloaked in his frat boy sense of raunchy humor and adolescent tastes. If anything, it's a role that erases the more developed characters Travolta has created within his limited range as an actor over a long career.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers takes a few demerits with an Oakie American accent that evaporates after the first few scenes. Meyers plays Reese with a lightness that validates the film's shallow attempt to replicate the tone of films like "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" (2005). Put simply, there's nothing at stake here and no ethical substance to justify the honky-donkey blood letting on display. It isn't fare to an audience to glorify armed attacks on society in the bluntly racist terms that Wax repeatedly uses to describe the "bad guys." It's not a ratings consideration. It's a matter of responsibility. Director Pierre Morel's brand of videogame action is something that denigrates the medium of cinema and elicits a numbed response to its glossy presentation. Reese and Wax aren't fighting for the citizens of Paris, they're fighting against them. With friends like these, you don't need any enemies.