Travolta weighs 250 if he weighs a pound. I’ve got chills, they’re multiplying. His massive shaved head no small part of the total. As unorthodox but inimitable secret agent Charlie Wax he snorts coke to stay alert, enjoys a cheeseburger whose name he made famous, slings two guns Hong-Kong style and racks up a body count in the twenties or thirties, minimum. His casual racism is borne out by the plot—a French-made film, we note—in which spy wannabe Jonathan Rhys Meyers is betrayed by his Parisian girlfriend when, seduced by an Islamic svengali, she puts her fashion expertise into designing the headscarf under which she sneaks into the American embassy carrying a load of C4 strapped to her chest. In the showdown, JRM begs her to leave this madness behind, he will forgive her, he still loves her. A decision: she moves for the trigger: he shoots her in the forehead on behalf of the greater good.
It seems clear it’s the girlfriend’s perspective we’re meant to take, wending our way home, turning back on or up our cell. She imagines, and we with her, that the love this man professes is imperfectly understood, circumscribed by his limitations, hollow to the point of affront. Salinger—may he rest in peace—gives his Franny a hard time, no doubt. But even her tentative initiation into the forms of prayer shame the clueless preppie who when he meets her, do you remember, at the train station tries to empty his face of all expression. A cheap shot, I guess, but the kind one keeps in mind for years.
Devotion is the enigma. And like a terrorist in the faded capital of secular pleasure, it perplexes us most because we know it is within. We know—would we stop it?—that our own heart beats for us like a slave.
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