New movies borrow from old movies every day of the week. It's an acceptable practice we describe as homage, a word derived from the French. From Paris With Love, a blithely violent film derived from something purporting to be a story idea of Luc Besson's -- more likely the idle firing of a pop-culture soaked synapse -- goes so deep into the territory of borrowing that it leaves respectable homage far behind. Directed by Pierre Morel ( Taken), this pickpocket of a movie flashes open its coat to proudly display all its swiped goodies.

Let's start with John Travolta, who plays Charlie Wax, a special operations agent for an unnamed but extremely bloodthirsty undercover American agency. To inhabit this role, he seems to have stolen Bruce Willis's bald head, along with the goatee Willis sports when he needs to look super tough and mature. This gleaming-headed Wax man has been sent to Paris to bust a drug ring and a terrorist cell. As a bonus, he will give machismo lessons to James (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a wonky polyglot who works as an aide to the U.S. Ambassador but longs to be Jason Bourne.

Theirs is a classic Odd Couple/Lethal Weapon action-movie male pairing: lunatic meets gentleman, torrential rain of bullets follows. In between bouts of slaughtering dozens of people on the grounds that they appear to be of Asian or Middle Eastern descent, Charlie teases James. He mocks James's fondness for chess with the put-down "Do I look like I play board games?" He calls his new partner "pard," which is intended to make fun of the dorkiness of people who call each other "pard," but instead just makes Charlie seem dorky. He tosses dead bodies down the world's largest spiral staircase while James hangs back, horrified, clutching an urn full of cocaine (which most people would have left in the car). Charlie also has a quickie with a prostitute, snorts some of said cocaine on the Eiffel Tower and shoots a woman in the head at a dinner party. Yet still, the conviction of his cool eludes him. You don't realize how gifted with cool Willis actually is until you watch Travolta trying to be him.