From Paris With Love - Mismatched duo shoot up the French capital

Luc Besson protégé Pierre Morel, maker of District 13 and Taken, has teamed up again with his mentor to make slam-bam action movie From Paris With Love. The filmmakers are French and the story takes place in Paris, but the stars are Anglo-American - John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

They form one of those mismatched buddy teamings beloved of the genre (see 48Hrs, Rush Hour et al). Rhys Meyers is Reese, a US embassy official in Paris who wants to get into the spy game. But he gets more than he bargained for when he teams up with Travolta’s visiting CIA agent Charlie Wax, a loose cannon whose pursuit of a Pakistani terror cell is soon racking up an impressive body count.

The goatee-sporting, shaven-headed Travolta throws himself around with gusto, and the action is bruising and bloody, but it wasn’t the violence that left me reeling. To a viewer on this side of La Manche, the film’s casually racist attitude to its non-white characters was shocking. If the PC police catch hold of Morel and Besson, I reckon they’ll be in for a spot of diversity training.

On general release from 26th February.

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A film critic for over 25 years, Jason admits the job can occasionally be glamorous – sitting on a film festival jury in Portugal; hanging out with Baz Luhrmann at the Chateau Marmont; chatting with Sigourney Weaver about The Archers – but he mostly spends his time in darkened rooms watching films. He’s also written theatre and opera reviews, two guide books on Rome, and competed in a race for Yachting World, whose great wheeze it was to send a seasick film critic to write about his time on the ocean waves. But Jason is happiest on dry land with a classic screwball comedy or Hitchcock thriller.