From Paris With Love Poster Art

This is a weird one.  That first, awesome teaser poster that we saw last summer, coupled of course with the intentionally evocative title, certainly lead the audience to believe that Taken director Pierre Morel's latest neo-Eurospy offering, From Paris With Love, will be in the James Bond vein.  But the underwhelming trailers and the kind of awful TV spots tell a different story.  It's clear that John Travolta's super-agent Charlie Wax is about as far from 007 as you can get and still be a super-agent.  Furthermore, based on the trailers, the film itself seems aggressively un-Bondlike.  Which is a bold and interesting direction for a Eurospy flick, neo- or otherwise, since the genre's entire raison d'etre comes down to emulating Bond movies. Of course, the idea of plugging a decidedly un-Bondian figure into the middle of such a plot is hardly new.  The xXx movies attempted to make a franchise out of it.  But this one is odd because it appears to deliberately flout the conventions of the genre while at the same time trading on them in its title and poster iconography.  Curious.  It could be that there is more to this film than can be demonstrated in the all-audiences trailers.  Or it could be a case of a bad movie with a misleading marketing campaign.  But despite the trailers, the print campaign has certainly intrigued me enough to find out! 

The international one-sheet (above) isn't nearly as clever as the teaser poster, nor is it Bondian, but it is at least fairly striking.  Not as much as the French poster designs, however, which still do trade a bit on Bondian iconography:

It's interesting that the French posters very boldly state the title in English.  From Russia With Love itself was originally released in France as Bons baisers de Russie.  So even in France, the title has been deliberately Anglicized, further trading on the 007 brand.  Again: curious! 

The coolest graphic for this film outside of that initial teaser image has to be these awesome busstop ads in Los Angeles.  I couldn't find any official pictures of these ones, so I decided to go outside and take my own.  We've just had a week of heavy rain in LA, so that's why the posters are streaked and gross.  I really like this design, though, with the Parisian cityscape making up the top of the gun and the Eiffel Tower serving as its sight.  I'm including pictures from different distances, because I like the effect the artwork has from a distance and as you get closer.  As of now, the movie itself remains an enigma to me.  (I hope, of course, that it will be good, and producer Luc Besson's track record with neo-Eurospy films like Taken and the Transporter franchise stands in its favor.  But I fear that it won't be.)  The print campaign, however, is impressive.