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The Vow

A saccharine and paint-by-numbers slice of romance, which is largely boosted by the appeal of its two leads.

Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace (3D)

The under-utilised 3D adds little to this prequel, which only serves as a sore reminder of the brilliance of the original films.

Any Questions For Ben?

The talented bunch of actors ably cut through the surface gloss, but it’s tough to remain invested in the plight of the self-absorbed lead.

Shame

It starts off as brutal but arresting stuff, and the two lead performances are scorching, but disappointingly dissolves into a case of tragedy for the sake of tragedy.

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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.