It's set in Paris, yes, but it's Travolting

There is no love in "From Paris With Love." There is, though, a great deal of noise, and there are some very funny scenes of John Travolta's stunt men running about trying to make him look like a combination of Jackie Chan and the pre-governorship Arnold Schwarz-enegger.

The Rock and today's other stern-faced action guys need not fear for their jobs.

Travolta had best stick to comedy. For brief moments, "From Paris With Love" tries to be a comedy - but only briefly. Then, there is an oh-so-serious shootout that requires more ammo than the gunfight at the OK Corral.

At least it moves briskly between comedy and action flick - clocking in at a fast 92 minutes.

A long way from the svelte white suit of "Saturday Night Fever," Travolta portrays a tough-guy loud mouth called Charlie Wax, who likes to shoot first and add up the body count later. He delights in breaking the rules. (How did such a wild man become a special agent for the U.S. government? Their personnel department must be a circus.)

Early on, he thwarts a terrorist plot to bomb a diplomatic meeting involving a U.S. bigwig who appears to be a parody of Hillary Clinton.

Travolta, with a bald head, a silly goatee and a hoop earring, puts on quite a show - yelling, ranting and overacting to the extreme. Your jaw might drop at the audacity of the display, but there is some fun in wondering how far he will go. The answer is: more than over the top.

The film, shot in Paris by a student of French filmmaker Luc Besson, has a decidedly European look - in spirit as much as geography.

Heroes of American films don't usually act like this (except maybe in Quentin Tarantino movies, which, of course, reflects Travolta's experience). There is even a reference to the Le Royale (the Big Mac in France) from "Pulp Fiction" - a cheap, but welcome, laugh.

Wax and his sidekick carry around a vase filled with cocaine for much of the movie. It's supposed to be evidence, but upon occasion they partake. Forced to stake out a house that is not a home, Wax kills some time sampling the pleasures offered. Some viewers will eventually find him to be repetitive and tiresome. We are almost persuaded to root for the bad guys to quiet him down.

The sidekick is James Reece, played by young actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who is assigned the thankless task of being the dull, straight-laced novice who is shocked by every move by his unorthodox partner.

In real life, his several arrests for wild carryings-on suggest he is by far a more zany personage than the real-life family man Travolta. One supposes, then, that some acting is involved in the balance we see in "From Paris With Love."

Reece is a lowly assistant to the U.S. ambassador, but he's also a low-level CIA agent who has never before had an action assignment. Although he claims to be from a rough Bronx neighborhood, he has a Cambridge education and is most interested in playing chess.

Assigned as Wax's "driver," he gets more and more involved in danger - much to his comedic regret. Like the audience, he is shocked at the show Travolta provides.

In one melee, he follows Travolta up a spiral staircase and is bemused that dead and mangled bodies keep falling from above as tough-guy Travolta systematically wipes out the enemy. The segment is made humorous by the fact we don't see the fight - just the discarded bodies.

The director is Pierre Morel, who scored a surprise hit last year with "Taken" and made an action star of Liam Neeson. "Taken," though, took itself seriously and unpretentiously as an action movie. Neeson played it straight all the way. The same cannot be said for Travolta.

There is little or no effort made to hide the fact that the stunt men move in for every action bit, even fast walking. In fact, some of the stunt men don't even resemble the star - except for the bald head, showcased at every opportunity.

Nothing special, "From Paris With Love" might serve as a time-killer for those who like mindless action movies that go over the top in senseless ways. There is some entertainment in watching, in sheer awe, as to how far this over-statement will go.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com