From Paris With Love — because maybe To Paris With Hate was too much of a spoiler. Don’t get me wrong: there’s plenty to recommend this whacked-out international-espionage actioner from Taken director Pierre Morel — all of it rooted in the sort of schadenfreude that populist European filmmakers can whip up while making a thriller about US foreign policy. From Paris With Love transplants terror-age xenophobia from Middle America to the banks of the Seine, a paradise that Yankee audiences can fetishize with an almost-equal measure of admiration (the architecture, the food, the culture — ooh-la-la!) and contempt (the French, the foreigners, the culture — ew!).

The fact that Morel is French suggests that the satirical air could be intentional — but then, Taken wasn’t a satire, and this movie is even more racist. Jonathan Rhys Meyers trades his Henry VIII hiss for a tristate simper as James Reece, an entry-level US spy posing as an embassy aid. His ambition is put to the test when he’s assigned to Charlie Wax (John Travolta), a notorious CIA gunman in Paris to blow away Asians (of various hues) and thwart a terror attack. Wax’s wild-man vagueness allows the plot to unfold on a need-to-know basis, which suits its chain of unfussy shoot-’em-up set pieces. A pervasive note of cocaine paranoia ups the entertainment value as the movie kills extras and minutes rekindling old war-on-drugs strife, then moves on to geopolitical anxiety’s main squeeze: Jihad.

Travolta is in youthful, easygoing form in the face of his guilt by association, outfitted like a Ministry roadie and having a field day playing his Killer Ugly-American caricature to the .44-calibre hilt. Meyers pouts in a chic suit like a model at an open call for 007, but comes around noticeably when he’s got Travolta to lean against. Their travelling clown act is actually amusing en route to a final-act twist/cheat that’s shocking not in its obviousness and stupidity but because it shows how far From Paris is willing to cast its net of distrust and fear. It’s a relief, almost, when it all ends on a hilariously facile note — one that seems to sigh, "Bitches, man."