AllMovie

Paris is an overwrought muddle of a crime drama. Director and co-writer Ramin Niami, who made his feature debut with the unrelentingly quirky urban drama Somewhere in the City, here takes a sharp turn into overly earnest melodrama. Niami has claimed that the film "exposes" the West Coast Asian sex slave trade, but it's not as though we haven't seen films on this subject matter before, and the ludicrous rogue cop plot machinations surrounding his exposé certainly don't help its credibility. Unless Niami believes that his best bet at affecting change is to reach late-night cable viewers with his message, his film can pretty much be written off as a failure in that regard. In any case, Paris isn't detailed or believable enough in its depiction of the business to educate viewers about anything except the continued use of what were previously thought to be outdated clichés. There's even a moment in this film in which the hero (stiff, amphibian-eyed Chad Allen) cradles a fallen friend in his arms, turns his face to the heavens and wails, "Nooooooo!" This is the kind of hackneyed cop movie moment that The Simpsons was parodying a decade before Paris was made. The film has some visual interest (and not just that embodied by leading lady Bai Ling) in its fairly interesting mix of high definition video and film. And few character actors are better than James Russo at playing a lowlife creep. John Cale's surprisingly cheesy electronic score adds to the niggling sense that Paris, with its absurdly sloppy plotting and broad characterizations, is intended as parody. But it's difficult to say whether or not the filmmakers were in on the joke.