Luc Besson’s writing varies in great degrees when his screenplays are laid out for examination. “Leon: The Professional” was excellent. “The Fifth Element” is one of my favorite sci-fi flicks. “Taken” was surprisingly well done and interesting. “Transporter” was OK in its first incarnation, though the sequels are awful.

His newest flick, “From Paris With Love,” looked like a pseudo-cheesy, action-packed story that would at least entertain, and it lived up to this low bar. From the beginning, I thought this looked like “Transporter” but with different — yet similar — characters; even to the point of the lead being a bald guy who blows things up to make the bad guys fall down.

John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers play secret agents that clock in at complete opposite ends of the spectrum: Travolta is a hard-hitting, action-driven, hit-now-and-ask-questions-later guy with a penchant for destroying anything and everything he comes in contact with. Rhys Meyers is a highly conservative, plant-bugs-and-avoid-dangerous-situations guy with “middle management” written all over him. The idea for the movie should be: Put the two of them together and let them learn what each needs in order to become better people. This barely happens, though.

The two characters learn about who the other is and then fail to be positive influences. Travolta’s constant violence-filled life encroaches on Rhys Meyers’ bland world, and apparently Besson forgot to write in the lessons to be learned while penning the adrenaline-pumping fights.

But this isn’t much of a problem, as this is supposed to be a sort of mindless action flick anyway.

It’s unfortunate Travolta was chosen to play the super agent hell-bent on kicking tail, because he doesn’t pull it off. His shaved head and jet-black beard don’t make him any more cool that he normally might look, and when he flashes his big toothy grins he looks even less like the bad boy he is supposed to be portraying. This character is almost as ridiculous as the one he played in “Swordfish” — yet another event where someone mistakenly believed Travolta should be a hip-looking bad boy. Whatever happened to the uber-cool Vincent character he played in “Pulp Fiction”? Why can’t Travolta just play that sort of bad boy, cool guy again?

Luckily Rhys Meyers’ character is tolerable, particularly when his knockout hottie of a girlfriend strolls into frame. The problem is you never become involved with these cliché characters.

When comedy tries to rear its head, it is promptly cut off before the attempt can be completed. It’s as if the director wanted to make sure everything in the story had a choppy feel, much like the editing. You see, the editing had to be cut very carefully to avoid showing that Travolta is not an older guy. His character is fast like kung-fu, and in order to achieve the image, Travolta’s movements are filmed very heavily to compensate. It’s the film trying too hard to convince us he’s tough.

As for the actual story and progression of the film, it chugs along without going very far. The formula works something like this: explosion, gun fight, pause while being shot at for some dialogue, find some fantastic method of rendering the enemies unconscious or dead.

This just repeats itself over and over until finally the movie wraps up with an ending where the two characters should have learned from each other, but instead are essentially just the same people they ever were.

Basically, the movie is a way to turn off your brain for a while, but without being a blockbuster, special-effects frenzy like most action movies. This doesn’t improve it, nor does it give it any sort of extra appeal for theater-goers. In the end, this movie will see fine rental value for bored people that have seen everything else that has come out that week. So wait around for a while and you too can fill a little chunk of your day with “Transporter 4” — er, I mean “From Paris with Love,” the newest in a long series of mistakes to be green-lit by Hollywood.