BEFORE: OK, last day of March, so let's check the format stats - it's a different situation now that I have a new DVR, I can record more stuff to DVD. Maybe I always could, maybe I just had a really unusually janky DVR, but that's neither here nor there. I'm not giving up on cable until I've seen every movie ever and have a copy of everything on DVD.
MARCH
14 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Long Weekend, Priscilla, The Assistant, Bottoms, Retribution, Ordinary Love, Honest Thief, In the Land of Saints and Sinners, Marlowe, Mechanic: Resurrection, Crank, Crank: High Voltage, Transporter 3, From Paris with Love
1 Movie watched on cable (not saved): Shining Through
5 watched on Netflix: Love Guaranteed, Players, The Kissing Booth, The Kissing Booth 2, The Kissing Booth 3
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Memory
1 watched on Hulu: Blacklight
1 watched on Hulu: Blacklight
1 watched on Roku: My Love Affair with Marriage
1 watched on a random site: Made in Italy
24 TOTAL
The month kind of got bookended by "Love" - first film of March was "Love, Guaranteed" and now it ends with "From Paris with Love". Tomorrow I'll post the actor links that will get me through to Easter. Today, Farid Elouardi carries over from "Transporter 3".
THE PLOT: In Paris, a young employee in the office of the U.S. Ambassador hooks up with an American spy looking to stop a terrorist attack in the city.
AFTER: This is a bit of a weird film - it's honestly hard to tell if Travolta is serious about playing a very wild character, or maybe wildly playing a very serious character. There might be a very fine distinction between those two things, but I kind of want to know which it is. Like one minute he's poking fun at "Pulp Fiction" by eating that burger called the "royale with cheese", like how can you possibly take that seriously, and then the next minute he's shooting two guys in the head and acting like a Jason Statham character. Can the same guy do both things, or does the "Pulp Fiction" reference break through the fourth wall and remind us that none of this is real, which subverts the process of suspending our disbelief? It's almost like a "Deadpool"-ish moment, the character is letting us know that he's being played by an actor that was in another movie, just like Deadpool might make a joke about Van Wilder or Green Lantern, also played by Ryan Reynolds. Right?
The central character is James Reese, a low-level U.S. diplomat in France, but he's got a secret ambition to be working for the CIA. Or he already works for the CIA, but he hasn't proven himself worthy of a mission just yet - as a test, the agency gets him to place a microphone in the French foreign minister's office, despite the fact that the U.S. and France are allies, but hey, maybe it's not that important, and it was just a test, after all. He nearly botches it, but eventually finds a way to secure the mike to the underside of a desk. The completion of this means he can be assigned to a real mission, which involves picking up his new partner, Charlie Wax, at the airport. Charlie is fighting with customs, who will not let him bring cans of his energy drink into the country - jeez, you'd think that the TSA would have confiscated cans of mysterious liquid before the flight.
But the cans hold something else, and it's not too hard to figure out what. Reese uses his diplomatic authority to declare the bag international mail or something, it's some weird customs technicality which then prevents James from needing to bribe the guy, which is what Charlie wanted him to do. You get the feeling right off that these two partners are very different people, and they're going to disagree a lot. Charlie takes James out for Chinese food, but he's very specific about where they need to eat. While James tries to impress with his extensive knowledge on the origin of egg foo yung, Charlie starts shooting up the place, revealing that it's a front for a Triad drug warehouse - but he only kills the waiters and chefs who shoot back at him. Again, it's all just kind of odd.
James ends up carrying around a big vase full of cocaine, which Charlie samples quite often. Nah, that doesn't call attention to them one bit while they're visiting the Eiffel Tower. Charlie seems to be running a very random operation/investigation across all the ethnic neighborhoods in Paris, but he's really tracing the drug money back to a bunch of Pakistani terrorists, who are maybe planning to infiltrate the U.S. embassy. In one abandoned apartment, they find photos of James pinned to the walls, which means someone may be either targeting him, or using him to gain access to the embassy. OK, enough undercover work for one day, James invites Charlie over for dinner with his girlfriend and her roommate, what could POSSIBLY go wrong there?
Again, I just can't quite figure out how seriously I'm supposed to take this film - when Travolta's character is hanging out of a car speeding down the highway and he's holding a giant rocket launcher, it feels kind of bonkers, like we're in Road Runner & Coyote cartoon territory. Can Charlie Wax blow up the terrorist car with his rocket launcher before the terrorist blows up the motorcade full of diplomats? Not if the car keeps swerving wildly like that. Can James pull the trigger and kill the suicide bomber before they activate the explosive vest? I guess we'll find out...
This film made some money back in 2010 but comparing the gross to the budget caused it to be regarded as a disaster. Well, sure, if you define a success as taking in more money than it cost to make, but isn't that old-school economics? The real success comes from franchising your film, and writer Luc Besson talked about making sequels, however 15 years have now gone by and there's no sign of one yet.
I didn't pick up on the James Bond reference, the title seems a bit based on the Bond classic "From Russia with Love". It's a bit of an odd coincidence that tonight I worked at the theater at a premiere event for the new show "Mobland" and former James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan was there. I was a few feet away from him as he signed autographs for a group of fans.
Directed by Pierre Morel (director of "The Gunman")
Also starring John Travolta (last seen in 'Die Hart"), Jonathan Rhys Meyers (last seen in "Albert Nobbs"), Kasia Smutniak (last seen in "Dolittle"), Richard Durden (last seen in "The Reckoning"), Yin Bing, Amber Rose Revah (last seen in "The Devil's Double"), Eric Godon (last seen in "In Bruges"), Francois Bredon (last seen in "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Chems Dahmani, Sami Darr, Julien Hagnery, Mostefa Stiti, Rebecca Dayan (last seen in "Tesla"), Michael Vander-Meiren (last seen in "3 Days to Kill"), Didier Constant, Alexandra Boyd (last heard in "The Wild Thornberrys"), Stephen Shagov (also carrying over from "Transporter 3"), Mike Powers, Nick Loren (last seen in "Lucky Numbers"), Melissa Mars, Hang Yin, David Gasman (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Frederic Chau (last seen in "Lucy"), Tam Solo, with cameos from Luc Besson, John Kiriakou, Kelly Preston (last seen in "Waiting to Exhale").
RATING: 4 out of 10 chess pieces
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