It's one of those weeks where I get to play Good Cop, Bad Cop with a pair of releases, so let's dive right in, shall we?

Good Cop is very much impressed with Frozen, the lean new horror pic from Hatchet director Adam Green. Coming out in limited release to capitalize on its Sundance appearance -- where screenings led to faintings and vomit, always a good sign for a horror picture -- Frozen takes a very simple premise and pushes it out to the absolute extreme.

Picture this: A couple college buddies -- one with girlfriend in tow -- want to go skiing but don't want to pay full price. How to accomplish this? Simple: Have girlfriend unzip a bit and bat her eyelashes at lift guy. Hey, presto! On the lift at a discount! All systems go for a day on the slopes with no signs of trouble until the trio pushes their luck and talks the same lift guy into giving them one final run after the mountain has been ordered cleared because of incoming weather. Lift guy gets called to the office before our trio arrives at the peak, replacement lift-guy doesn't realize that there is anyone still on the chairs and shuts the system down leaving our trio stranded on a chairlift, high above the ground, with the resort not scheduled to re-open for another five days.

And that's the movie: Three college kids stranded on a chairlift, high above the ground, facing the very real possibility of freezing to death unless they can figure out a way of getting help. It's an extremely simple concept, gutsily so, and Green pulls it off remarkably well. Pretty much every scenario you could possibly think of for this sort of situation plays out on screen, all of it executed very well, with the trio of actors at the core -- Canada's Shawn Ashmore among them -- turning in solid work across the board. It's lean, effective stuff and comes highly recommended.

And now it's time for Bad Cop to arrive. 

Pierre Morel is generally treated as one of the brighter lights of the current French wave. The talented cinematographer turned director first stepped behind the camera - as opposed to manning it - for 2004's District B13,  a flawed but hugely entertaining action romp. After that came 2008 surprise hit Taken, a film that landed him the director's gig for an upcoming adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic Dune. But before getting into that one he's got another, From Paris With Love, for us. And having sat through this clunker I'm generally inclined to think that Taken was a fluke, a stroke of luck that will go down as Morel's high point thanks more to the stellar work of star Liam Neeson than anything Morel himself can legitimately take credit for. The prospect of Morel tackling something as complex and subtle as Dune now leaves me very, very afraid.

From Paris With Love stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers as an assistant to the US Ambassador to France, a role that really serves as a cover for his real employment as a low-ranking secret agent. He longs to climb the ranks but has no opportunity to do so, at least not until the arrival of a brash super-agent (John Travolta) who needs some help tracking down a potential terror cell.

Taken was a success -- and very deservedly so -- because it put a remarkably subtle, character-based spin on the whole secret agent / revenge thing. Liam Neeson did remarkable work as a father -- highly trained but still first and foremost a father -- from a gang of underground flesh traders. Yes, it was loaded with action sequences and heavy doses of both adrenaline and testosterone but all of it remained anchored in some remarkably strong character work and those emotional underpinnings were what made it into a runaway international success.

With From Paris With Love, however, Morel appears to have taken every lesson he should have learned with Taken and thrown them out the window. Where the first film was subtle, this one is clumsy and obvious and unrepentantly stupid. Travolta is far less a character than a big bundle of twitchy, secret agent cliches dropping a string of remarkably unfunny one-liners at every available opportunity while also being very obviously replaced by a stunt double for every major action sequence in the film. It's a pity that Rhys Meyers -- an actor who may have just killed his chances of parlaying his Tudors success into a viable big screen career with this -- has to play off this guy, but the reality is that his character was dead long before Travolta showed up, having been saddled with an entirely unconvincing American accent and very weakly written character. Both are bad enough on their own but there is also meant to be a buddy comedy in here somewhere, one that sadly has absolutely zero chemistry between the buddies. Save your money and your brain cells. Give this one a miss.