A personal aide to U.S. Ambassador in France, James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) has an enviable life in Paris and a beautiful French girlfriend, but his real passion is his side job as a low level operative for the CIA. All James wants is to become a bona fide agent and see some real action. So when he s offered his first senior level assignment, he can t believe his good luck until he meets his new partner, special agent Charlie Wax (John Travolta) a trigger happy, wisecracking, loose cannon who s been sent to Paris to stop a terrorist attack. Wax leads James on a white knuckle shooting spree through the Parisian underworld that has James praying for his desk job. But when James discovers he s a target of the same crime ring they re trying to bust, he realizes there s no turning back...and that Wax himself might be his only hope for making it through the next forty eight hours alive.