As well as finding himself pigeonholed as cinema’s new favorite action hero – which led to the law of diminishing returns setting in a dozen times in a row over the course of the last decade – Liam Neeson’s success with Taken also led to an explosion in thinly-veiled imitators, of which From Paris with Love was just one of many.
Whether you’re talking about Kevin Costner’s 3 Days to Kill, Sean Penn’s self-serious and self-indulgent The Gunman, or pretty much Neeson’s entire back catalogue post-2008, the “old guy kicking ass” subgenre churned out a lot more duds than it did hits, but not many of them were as transparent as Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Travolta’s jaunt through the French capital.
Taken director Pierre Morel was behind the camera, Taken writer and producer Luc Besson was present pulling double duty yet again, while a veteran Academy Award-nominated star familiar with the ins and outs of the genre took the lion’s share of the focus, only for the end result to find itself panned into the ground by critics and bomb at the box office after just about recouping its $52 million budget.
Sure, there’s no doubt at least a handful of folks out there who got a kick out of the film and will defend it to the death as a guilty pleasure, but they’re nowhere to be found on a Reddit thread blasting From Paris with Love thoroughly, which reaches the conclusion that “there’s very little that’s unironically good here.”
Harsh? Perhaps. Accurate? Absolutely.
Published: Sep 9, 2023 02:15 am