Movie Review (Dan’s Take): From Paris With Love

Those French. They may look down their collective noses at fat Americans, but they sure do love the way we get s**t done. Luc Besson– cinema’s most prolific Frenchman– has unleashed another action drenched story template (ala Taken, The Transporter) and cozied up with his “Besson School of Filmmaking” graduate Pierre Morel (Taken and the upcoming Dune remake) to offer up the guiltily pleasurable From Paris With Love.

Together, Besson and Morel massage French-American relations like it’s nobody’s business. If there was ever an homage to the American action stereotype, From Paris With Love is it; a story-lite action flick that knows exactly what it wants to be and clocks in with a lean and functionally breezy 95 minutes to deliver the goods. Morel’s crafted a movie that placates its American audience with backslapping proclamations like “We saved your frog leg eating asses in two World Wars!” and gun-loaded, badly behaved, star-spangled ass kicking, but alternately winks at its French viewers with a nod of “stupid cowboys”.

It’s panderingly duplicitous… and it works.

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