"I was overseas in battle, when the postman came to me,
He handed me a letter, I was happy as could be.
The fighting was all over, the battle had been won.
I opened up the letter and it started,

Dear John, Oh, how I hate to write,
Dear John, I must let you know tonight,
That my love for you has gone away like grass out on the lawn,
And tonight I'll wed another, dear John.

Could you send me back my picture? .  . . 'cause my husband wants it now,
When I tell you who I'm wedding, you won't care much anyhow.
The ceremony's started, and I'll wed your brother Don.
Won't you wish us happiness forever, dear John?"
       
       -- 1953 popular song by Ferlin Husky and Jean Shepard.

       That song title quickly became part of the vernacular.  But in the film its message comes through feebly and its audience appeal is lame at best. If it makes it at the box office, the femme audience will have to do it. Otherwise, watch it become a fast disappearing act.
     
     After awhile the film spins wheels in idle while you're awaiting the next antagonism. Plot movement gets really, really sluggish. There is really no feeling of life in their interpretations, Channing Tatum being apparently perfectly satisfied with being little more than decorative furniture. In a word, the film has run aground early on with nary a lift-off anywhere. Seyfried's actually pretty good but she's alone in generating energy. Love?  Yeah, well . . . you guess that it's supposed to exist there.
      
      As the story goes on this South Carolina picturesque seashore, handsome hunk Special Forces soldier John Tyree (Channing Tatum), home for awhile, meets and falls instantly for wealthy and pretty Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) who's on her spring break. They swirl and whirl together in their spiraling new love. (You gather that by her, not him.) He thinks seriously about leaving the service in a year or so so their romance can take off.     
    
     But it's the spring of 2001, and you know what's coming.
    
     But for the moment, John's withdrawn dad (Richard Jenkins), obsessed with his coin collection, will present the necessary conflict, this being that Savannah will err in concluding that he is autistic, this because her close male friend (Henry Thomas) has an autistic son whose traits are very familiar to her. This unfortunate assumption on her part will cause their first serious fight and one with three of her other male friends who will be bombarded with John's fists.
      But soon there's 9/11 and their plans now go on indefinite hold. John and Savannah write to each other regularly.

   At these points in the film, director Lasse Hallstrom, plotwise, does his best with an inherently perilous situation, that of relying on music to back up rather uninteresting letters. One of those will be the source of cruel surprises for John.

       Here's a movie that undoubtedly had big ambitions. Somehow they entered into permanent non-realization by way of an inadequately conceived development after the opening fast food love explosion, this rendered impotent by a cardboard hero.
      What the heck -- it's good for pre-teen girls.


"From Paris With Love"
My 0-10 rating:  5
Genre: Action thriller with comic overtones
Director: Pierre Morel
Screenwriter: Luc Besson, Adi Hasak
Starring: John Travolta, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Kasia Smutniak, Richard Durden
Time: 1 hr., 35 min.
Rating: R (strong bloody violence throughout, drug content,
         pervasive vulgarity, brief sexuality)

      In its fun with shootouts, this film will have videogame players unconsciously gripping for the firing handles. It's all just a run-through, a very unimaginative one, of bloody gun battles and trivial martial arts stuff in shopworn thematic material, all going to help make believe that this is a legitimate thriller.
     
       John Travolta seems almost laid back in this self-satire on film violence, firing away as though on auto pilot, hardly seeming to stop to figure out whatever he's doing. There are ho-hum garden variety car chases, hackneyed explosions, crudely designed battles with bad guys, all heavily armed with automatic weapons, who drop like blades of grass under a mower, this, of course, with blasts of blood. And, like how 'bout one car chase in which he terminates a North African terrorist with a shell from a bazooka. Other scenarios feature the obligatory fire escapes and rooftops.
       Trouble is, of course, that the film script lays in a only a few variations and distractions, that is, pacebreakers on the bangs and booms.

     So here we go with heroes tracking down a terrorist plot. James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is the personal aid to the American ambassador in Paris, Bennington (Richard Durden) and also a secondary-level, go-fer CIA lackey. He'd like something more out of life -- like high adventure. Seems his lovely girlfriend Caroline (Kasia Smutniak) is just not enough.
       Well, who knows, maybe Reese's new acquaintance with ace CIA agent shoot-from-the-hip Charlie Wax (John Travolta) will work for him. We'll see this loose cannon shortly blazing two Izis in slo-mo. First off, they'll get at a Chinese drug ring but at the same time they're to terminate a terrorist conspiracy.  Just what the conspiracy is all about is never explained -- they're just baddies. And soon we're off to Pakistani suicide bombers.
     Wax, not surprisingly, is a master of automatic weaponry but also martial arts, all this helping him delete about ten or so men, this all the while as Reese stands in as the intellectual who can't seem to do anything well except beating Wax at chess.  Actually, grant that he's pretty cool with Caroline. Not so Wax at what he does -- he gets the job done but a suave James Bond he ain't.