PARIS HAS FALLEN Review: Staking Out Fresh New Thriller Territory

Capturing the spirit of an action-thriller film franchise and distilling it into a crackerjack series is no easy task.

Paris Has Fallen (2024)
The eight-episode series makes its U.S. premiere on Friday, December 6, exclusively on the Hulu streaming service. I've seen the first four episodes.

Kicking off with Antoine Fuqua's Olympus Has Fallen (2013), which was pretty good, continuing with Babak Najafi's London Has Fallen (2016), which was quite terrible, and descending deeply into the quality abyss with Ric Roman Waugh's Angel Has Fallen (2019), viewers might groan at the very idea of an entire eight-episode series that riffed on the film franchise, which teetered on the idea of a national leader in peril, buffeted by bloodshed and a frenzy of firearms.

Yet, creator Howard Overman was having none of that. Longtime writer Overman is quite familiar with fashioning a rich variety of compelling episodic television shows, including Dirk Gently, Misfits, and, most recently, War of the Worlds (the British version, obviously). Freed from any obligation to build a show around Fallen star Gerard Butler and his U.S. Secret Service background, Overman imagines a scenario that tips its hat to the films, while staking out its own distinctive territory.

The first episode pays homage to the franchise by setting up an outlandish situation in which an Evil Villain and his army of well-trained minions invade an embassy in Paris and kill many, many people, foiled in part by a French minister's head of security, Vincent (Tewfik Jallab), and a suspiciously spry and deadly undercover martial artist, Zara (Ritu Arya). Soon, Vincent and Zara, who is revealed to be an MI-6 agent, must work together to uncover the true intentions of said villain, performed to the utmost degree of brutal, cold, and diabolical evil by the superbly slithery Sean Harris, who has been stalking movie and television screens for many years as a frightening apparition in the flesh. (Truly, for me he has become the screen's epitome of evil.)

In this case, his flesh has been horribly scarred, which points to one motivation for his crimes against humanity. Creator Howard Overman, who also wrote the first four episodes, begins to ratchet up tension by digging deeper into the antagonist's motives. The 'ratcheting up tension' is always a tricky thing for series that are based on or inspired by feature films, as recently evidenced by the inability of The Day of the Jackal to fall into a giant narrative sidestep into routine melodrama.

While not entirely avoiding plot holes in its first four episodes, Paris Has Fallen misdirects and distracts the viewer with numerous, numerous, numerous action scenes, many of which feature intensely nasty and quite bloody hand-to-hand combat, and most of which involve firearms of some sort firing through body parts. John Woo would be proud of expert director Oded Ruskin, who helmed the first four episodes.

Our friends in Canada, France, Spain, the UK and Sweden have already been treated to the series. Based on the first four episodes, I have high confidence that the series will continue to surprise and startle and splatter through its inevitable smashing endings.

After Paris, who knows which city will fall next? If producer Studio Canal has anything to say about it, I would suggest to leaders of nations around the world: invest in more bulletproof windows and doors pronto. And beware, innocent bystanders, men, women and children alike: no one is safe.

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