Susan Granger’s review of “From Paris With Love” (Lionsgate)
You know things have gone from bad to worse when John Travolta starts riffing himself, evoking the far better bang-bang days when he was working with Quentin Tarantino and John Woo.
James Reece/Richard Stevens (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is a double agent in Paris, toiling as an adroit, multi-lingual, chess-playing attaché to the American Ambassador (Richard Durden) and as a low-level undercover CIA errand-boy who swaps license plates on cars in dark parking garages. Plus, he’s got a gorgeous French/Muslim fiancée, Caroline (Kasia Smutniak). Problem is: when he gets a really challenging assignment, he’s teamed with a foul-mouthed operative, Special Agent Charlie Wax (Travolta), a free-wheeling former mercenary, whose trigger-happy, bad-boy antics could well blow their cover as they’re trying to take down Chinese coke dealers and capt