Condoms, priceless artifacts and a pretty lady — a standard night for John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

From Paris With Love

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From Paris With Love is an adequate action film that entertains without doing anything new or notable.

Oh dear, does that make it sound boring? It isn't. I like “adequate action movies,” and you probably do too. Adequate action movies provide more car chases, explosions and flying bodies than adequate documentaries or adequate romances, to cite two examples. It's just that the creative team behind From Paris With Love also made Taken and District B13, so we know they can do much better than this.

You've got Jonathan Rhys Meyers as James, a pleasant, mild-mannered low-level secret agent who aspires to do more field work for the CIA. He gets his wish when he's thrown together with a boorish, uncontrollable super-agent named Charlie Wax (John Travolta) and the two of them rampage through Paris, with Wax killing bad guys left and right and James trying to keep up without losing his sanity, his life or his hot fiancée (Kasia Smutriak).

This is one of those “mismatched partner” films in which we identify with the priggish by-the-book type at first, but secretly hope that he loosens up a bit and learns a thing or two from his loose-cannon counterpart. The main problem is that the maverick agent, Wax, is pretty much impossible to like. This might be the most unpleasant character Travolta has played since Terl in Battlefield Earth. He's rude, thoughtless, violent to the point of psychosis and shows not the slightest sign of human feelings toward any of the people he kills, including several innocent bystanders. He’d appal us if he weren't such a cliché. However, since this film is constructed entirely out of well-established action tropes, he gets a free pass, and we wait for the next shootout or fist fight, which is always just around the corner.

You might groan and roll your eyes at this film, but you probably won't be bored. If you absolutely need your action fix and nothing else is available, this will do the trick. Nobody will remember From Paris With Love two years from now, but it passes the time rather painlessly.