This gonzo wild man storms into the movie at a Paris airport, where security refuses to let him enter the country with his precious energy drinks whose containers hide firearms. But with the last-minute intervention of his new partner, James Reese (a mustachioed Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a personal aide to the American ambassador in France, Wax is allowed in. 

Winking broadly, “From Paris With Love” leads us back into vintage James Bond territory where fiendish Asian baddies were casually exterminated like so many cockroaches. What’s another billion anyway? In this movie, whose title echoes that of the second Bond film in that endless franchise, the drug dealers are somehow related to the Pakistani terrorists on whom “From Paris With Love,” all but forgetting about drugs, directs its searchlights in its second half. The turning point comes with the smashing of a cocaine-filled vase that Reese has been dutifully toting from place to place. 

“From Paris With Love,” Mr. Morel’s follow-up to his B-movie blockbuster, “Taken,” is a really a one-sided buddy movie in which a leather-clad Mr. Travolta, with a shaved head and an earring, camps it up in the Vin Diesel supermacho style. Details in the screenplay by Adi Hasak, based on a Luc Besson story, signal that beneath his facade Wax is really a softie. He goes moony when a recording of “(They Long to Be) Close to You” comes on a car radio, then demands his companions not tell anyone of his weakness. Late in the movie he is also revealed as a killer at the chessboard, as is Reese.

Mr. Travolta so completely dominates the movie that Mr. Rhys Meyers can barely crawl out from under his shadow once Wax appears. Mr. Rhys Meyers’s better moments all occur in early scenes before Mr. Travolta blasts onto the screen. Reese has a seemingly perfect girlfriend, Caroline (Kasia Smutniak), and is the apple-polishing golden boy of his boss, Ambassador Bennington (Richard Durden). A low-level operative for the C.I.A., Reese has cloak-and-dagger dreams that are finally rewarded when he is teamed with the appalling Wax.

I am ashamed to admit that this empty-headed, preposterous, possibly evil mélange of gunplay and high-speed car chases on Parisian boulevards is a feel-good movie that produces a buzz. Even more than “Taken,” a kidnapping drama with the semblance of a heart, “From Paris With Love” wallows in action for action’s sake. 

The set pieces are precisely calibrated movements in a symphony of violence with no adagio. There is the scene in which Reese watches spellbound on a circular staircase as bodies plummet past him. During a breathless highway chase Wax hangs out of the car window with a rocket launcher aimed at the green Volvo driven by a terrorist, and you can hardly wait for the detonation. 

The soundtrack, in which David Buckley’s beat-driven orchestral score seamlessly mingles with the sounds of gunfire, suggests a hip-hop suite precisely coordinated with Michel Abramowicz’s jiggling, agitated cinematography. In these scenes you lean back, let the action wash over you and feel the caffeinated glow as it seeps into bones. For better or worse, “From Paris With Love” is an effective stimulant.

original post done by:  STEPHEN HOLDEN at http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/movies/05from.html?ref=movies