From Paris With Love

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:18:00 +0000

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent — Isaac Asimov

Luc Besson is credited with the “story” for this violent comic book of a thriller that is an insult to Paris. Years ago, Besson wrote Le Dernier Combat and The Fifth Element, flicks that are still worth seeing. He either wrote From Paris With Love in one second on the back of a postage stamp, is imaginatively bankrupt, or really needs the money. (All three perhaps?) Here’s the so-called story.

James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), personal assistant to the American ambassador in Paris, dabbles in tame black ops, such as clandestinely swapping license plates. One day, Charlie Wax (John Travolta, gun in one hand, ham in the other) arrives from the States for some extra-special ops, and Reece gets to be his partner. You can tell Wax is a badass because he’s built like a wrestler, has a bald head and black goatee, and cusses out French Customs. Sure enough, Wax is not in Gay Paree two minutes before he annihilates a Chinese restaurant, walks off with a vase full of cocaine, punches out six gnarly Asians at once, and announces plot points (how postmodern!). He proceeds to liquidate Paki terrorists. Yes, “Paki,” because that's how Wax talks, spouting racist jive that we’re apparently supposed to think is jocular because, you know, it’s Travolta, and he can so do glib-cutesypoo-charming-funny while mowing down foreign baddies. That’s acting for you. Hah-hah.

Reese, downright priggish on mayhem and slaughter, reproves Wax’s methods. Not to worry. He is bound to come-on-over to righteous American slo-mo killing. What happens, see, is that Reece gets blood on his face from an offed terrorist and then observes himself in a mirror. (Get it?! He sees himself baptized in blood!) Consequently, he begins to male bond with Wax. In the end, Reece proves he is a pistol-packing man—just like Wax has taught him to be—so much an hombre, in fact, that he can shoot his girlfriend and strut off to play chess with Wax. Yup, that's Reece’s character arc: He changes from being reticent about killing to wholeheartedly embracing it.

Admittedly, the fight and slow motion sequences are crisply edited, but the narrative is just one set piece after another of shoot kill, shoot kill, kill kill kill. That’s why the film exists. The many males and couple of females gunned down are nearly all swarthy or almond-eyed types. Beaucoup spurting blood squibs interspersed with jokes accompany les massacres. Thus the rancidity of the violent, big-American-star, buddy film is on display once again.

You will notice I’m not disposed to speak well of From Paris With Love. Alas, honesty compels me to note that near the end of the second act there is a car chase. From The Keystone Cops to Bullitt and beyond, car chases are a worthy subset of film genres. In this “how-did-they-do-that?” chase, Travolta/Wax, clutching a bazooka, hangs out the side window of a monster silver Audi doing about 150mph (flagrantly effective product placement). Wax needs a clear bead on a car in front so he can blow it to smithereens. The road is a European super highway, so the other cars all around are zipping right along, too. The pursuit swerves between comical and death defying. Whichever, it’s a knuckle-biting gas and up there with the best car chases ever on film.

But is a great car chase a good enough reason to watch a stupid, ugly film that makes yet another spectacle of killing people? Perhaps Luc Besson and everyone associated with this dross may still be perceptive enough to discern a rhetorical question when they encounter one.

Written by: Neil Flowers, February 17th 2010

Taken

admin — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:04:00 +0000

Directed by Pierre Morel

20th Century Fox

Reading this review will tell you all you need to know about Taken. If you haven't see the film, perhaps now is the time for you to cease reading, as spoilers abound. Then again, the film follows an overused and clichéd Hollywood format that makes spoilage an inevitability if you've a tendency for moviegoing, and my commentary on Taken might be more worth your while than viewing the ninety-minute film. The choice is yours to make.

Ever wonder what you'd get by mixing sexist stereotypes with ones about Muslims? Oh wait, I think that's happened before -- many, many times. Taken is just the most recent example of this ever-present phenomenon, and it has brought in $124 million to date. Apparently tired tropes sell.

Liam Neeson plays the estranged father, Bryan Mills, of Kim (Maggie Grace), a spoiled yet sweet seventeen-year-old girl who lives with her mother (Famke Janssen) and step-father in posh American splendor. Mills recently quit his job—which he describes as being a "preventer" for an unspecified special ops entity run by the US government—in order to build a relationship with his daughter. The conflict begins almost immediately, as Kim requires her father's legal permission to go on an adult-free, intercontinental vacation with a friend to follow U2's European Tour. (She initially tells her dad she'll be spending the summer in Paris). Dad tells Daughter that the world is a dangerous place. Mom tells dad he's being overprotective. Dad caves in hopes of engendering Daughter's love.

When Kim and her friend Amanda, a sexually permissive nineteen-year-old whose sole role in Taken is to put the two young women in danger by following her hormonal whims, arrive in Paris they are promptly snatched up by a group of men, but not before we learn that Kim is a virgin. We discover within minutes (thanks to Dad's "particular set of skills") that the girls have been taken by a group of Muslim Albanians that specialize in kidnapping of young, foreign girls who are traveling alone (read: without male protection) and are to be sold into sexual slavery. The star and crescent tattoo on the captor's hand somehow lets Dad know that he has ninety-six hours to save Daughter.

So how does Mills do it? By being hyper-masculine to the point of invincibility, of course. These Muslim men stole his property, after all, and he wants it back. (The kidnapping is to be read, in part, as the fault of overly permissive and naive Mom who used guilt to override Dad's "reason" to allow Daughter go to Paris, which included colluding in Daughter's lying to Dad and using ridiculous Dr. Phil-like platitudes about "not smothering" Daughter.) The mission of this now-enraged father will not be thwarted, and all tactics (including rampant killing and bodily torture) are at his disposal to save poor Kim while her purity is still in tact.

Being a virgin, and therefore highly valuable, Kim is singled out for sale to a wealthy businessman. Unfortunately, sluttish Amanda is not so fortunate and Mills finds her dead of a drug overdose, a punishment for failing to be sexually chaste. After looking in a number of seedy places, Mills works his way up the food chain to the elite meat market where he sees Kim sold—after being described as "certified pure"—for half a million dollars to an older Arab man. (Kim isn't the girl sold to this man. He has bought a veritable harem of virgins who are dolled up and dressed in white lace robes, which veil their young faces, before being bought to his bed chamber.)

I already told you that Mills saves Kim, and that's where the story neatly ends. We don't find out what happens to the rest of the girls or the traffickers that Mills encounters on his quest. And really, he makes it quite clear that he's not interested in their fate, which he sees as just a part of the business. Mills only cares about the fate of Kim because she is his daughter, and therefore, his quest was personal. (He tells this to one of the higher-ups, just before he kills him.)

Lest lascivious France escape unscathed, the French government benefits from human sexual slavery too, padding their pockets through the sale of female flesh. Interestingly, the system of trafficking itself is never scrutinized; it's simply accepted as the way things are. Except that what is shown in Taken is not really the way things are in the world of sex trafficking.

For starters, it is extremely uncommon for an American girl to be trafficked. Instead, the victims tend to be women who "originate from countries experiencing political and economic instability, internal displacement, militarism, civil unrest, internal armed conflict, and natural disasters." Women who are trafficked tend to be from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, not the United States—but reality doesn't serve Taken's cautionary, paternalistic, white supremacist tale. In order to effectively convey its fearmongering, Taken needs its victim to be a picture of feminine perfection: lily white, innocent, young, beautiful, and American. (Kim even dreams of being a singer instead of taking advantage of her family's economic privilege to pursue a more cerebrally engaging career.)

The use of anti-Muslim and anti-feminist fare in Hollywood blockbusters is certainly nothing new. (What is interesting, though, is how other reviews have ignored—or promoted—their use in Taken.) It is ironic that the makers of Taken actually reinforce the ideas that make sex trafficking possible. Advocating for social, political, and economic equality of marginalized populations is one method endorsed to curb the sale of women and build struggling economies through legal means. You see, viewing someone through a lens of humanity has the funny effect of making it more difficult to treat them as chattel or evildoers. I guess the makers of Taken didn't get that memo.

Written by: Mandy Van Deven, February 12th 2009