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The Other Guys

With the two leads revealing pitch-perfect chemistry, this hysterically funny film is packed with bizarre dialogue and over the top action.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

While containing a handful of impressive action sequences, this film is let down by a contrived premise and by-the-numbers script.

Despicable Me

While it falls short of other digital animations, this family film is boosted by a first class voice cast, plenty of laughs and a warm heart.

The Disappearance Of Alice Creed

Largely devoid of suspense and thrills, this film is slightly lifted by Gemma Arterton’s compelling performance.

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From Paris With Love (Film)

by Mark Demetrius | February 15, 2010 16:20 | Edited February 15, 2010 16:22

An abysmal film: a buddy comedy with no jokes, implausible storylines and boring action scenes

This is a film so numbingly inane and trite that it looks like a parody - especially - when it's trying to be serious or moving.

 

Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays James Reese, personal assistant to the American ambassador to France. His wish for more adventurous work is granted when he's teamed up with Charlie Wax (John Travolta), a bald, thickset and goateed CIA operative and loudmouth who - you guessed it - doesn't play by the rules.

 

This is the wafer-thin pretext for a massive body-count, and a seemingly infinite number of scenes in which cliches about baddies being lousy shots and goodies being superhuman plumb new depths. There's a transparent attempt to justify the absurdity with jokey sped-up camerawork, but it works about as well as the leaden Pulp Fiction in-jokes.

 

The story - such as it is - involves a combination of Asian drug dealers and Pakistani terrorists; both groups exist principally to provide Wax and Reese with target practice.

And then there's Reese's girlfriend Carolina (Kasia Smutniak): enigmatic without being intriguing.

Even judged on its own vacuous terms, From Paris With Love is utterly abysmal. It's a comedy with precisely one funny line, a buddy movie in which the bonding between the two male leads is implausible, and an action flick in which the endless chase and ‘shoot-‘em-up' scenes are boring rather than exciting. The love interest isn't interesting, the plot is daft, there's an unsettling subtext of casual racism, excessive use of colour filters, distracting mood music and an ending which manages to be even more fatuous than everything which preceded it. Avoid it like the plague.