The first really grown-up film I ever saw (excluding the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” franchises) was “Thunderball.” I was 7, and Sean Connery was a grand Scottish god on that TV screen.

Since then, like most men, I have been enamored with spy films. I won’t get into the wish-fulfillment aspects of that, nor will I go into the visual and psychological appeal of girls, gadgets and guns. We don’t need to ask why. We just know that spies are cool.

For all its flaws (which I’ll get to in a minute), “From Paris With Love” manages to be cool too, not only for its revelry in the conventions of the spy genre, but for its shattering of them.

James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is a U.S. State Department worker slaving away at the American Embassy in Paris and dreaming of work as a secret agent. The closest he gets to real intelligence duty is switching out license plates for the people who do the real dirty work, until he gets a call to pick up legendary spy and assassin Charlie Wax (John Travolta) at the airport.

From the moment he meets the outspoken, rough-hewn Wax, Reece is catapulted into a seedy Parisian underworld filled with explosions, cocaine, guns and a fiancé who just wants him to come home for dinner.

The spy who’s in over his head is nothing new to movies. Plenty of flicks, some of them funny, some of them just plain sad, have already trodden that ground, but few have done it with as much swagger. Director Pierre Morel (fresh off his triumphant thriller “Taken”) packs plenty of high energy action into the film, from a gunfight in a Chinese restaurant to a shootout in a stairwell. And yet, in spite of all of its well-executed effects, the film manages to keep a raw feel, far and away from the polish of a Bond film.

The places where it fails are the in-between moments. The film’s heart, which seems to be at some points between Reece and his fiancé and at others between Reece and Wax, failed to pack any real emotional punch, throwing the balance between hard action and soft humanity way, way off. It’s sort of like getting a poorly-worded Valentine’s Day card. It’s the thought that counts, but you really would’ve liked to see a bit more effort, you know?

In the acting department, there isn’t much to consider other than Travolta and Rhys Meyers. Apart from a few brief interactions with supporting characters, they own the film, rushing in and out of action scenes with a few little slow-downs in between. Rhys Meyers plays the straight man admirably, and even manages to generate empathy when he begins to flinch in the eyes of the violence, but Travolta steals every scene, practically bathing in the garishness of his role. Even if you don’t like the guy, you’ll like the character. Wax is everything you want in an action hero: reckless, hilarious and absolutely indestructible.

Though its ending does manage to cheapen things a little bit (it’s a “twist,” which I’m flat out sick of seeing), the film does maintain a sense of good old-fashioned shoot ‘em up fun that movies gloss over far too much these days. It might be a tad predictable, and it might even be a bit corny, but “From Paris With Love” is far from just a cheap imitation of spy movie greatness. It’s the real deal.