Les Aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010)
Directed by Luc Besson

Film Review

There was a certain inevitability that Jacques Tardi's famous series of comic books featuring the exploits of the fearless Adèle Blanc-Sec (which first appeared in 1976) would one day reach the big screen.  Film director and producer Luc Besson has long dreamed of doing just this and finally he was able to realise his ambition, although the end result looks far more like a debauched send-up of the Indian Jones saga than anything that was ever conceived by Tardi.

Tardi originally conceived his tomboy heroine as an overt parody of the kind of infallible hero that featured heavily in the serialised adventure stories of the first decade of the 20th Century (stories which were subsequently adapted for cinema by Louis Feuillade).  Likewise, Besson's Les Aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec is a spirited lampoon of the archetypal Hollywood action adventure movie, hilariously funny in places but too obviously enamoured of the genre it parodies to be totally effective. The feisty heroine is played by Louise Bourgoin, a former model and television presenter who recently made an impressive acting debut in Anne Fontaine's La Fille de Monaco (2008).

With its totally chaotic plot, surfeit of O.T.T. special effects and completely ludicrous characterisation, the film is extremely easy to fault.  However, as a piece of mindless entertainment which has been slung together with scant regard for the aesthetics of cinema or the mocking eye of the serious film critic it is pretty well unsurpassed.  Here we are reacquainted with Luc Besson's juvenile side, not seen since his equally outlandish sci-fi spectacular The Fifth Element (1997).

The maddest, fastest and most wildly energetic French film of the year, Les Aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec is either (depending on your personal taste) uproarious fun or a pointless cinematic abomination.  In either case, any film in which Louise Bourgoin plays a pterodactyl-fighting action hero (in frilly corsets) is worth consideration.

Film Synopsis

In 1912, the plucky journalist Adèle Blanc-Sec undertakes an expedition to Egypt in the hope of finding an ancient remedy for her sister, who is close to death after injuring herself in a game of tennis.  Not only does she have to avoid the many traps laid for her by her formidable enemy Dieuleveult, she must also grapple with some far from amiable mummies.  Adèle's extraordinary adventures continue when she returns to Paris to find that a deadly pterodactyl is terrorising the entire city.  It seems that the prehistoric monster, a hundred and fifty million years out of its time zone, has just hatched from a perfectly preserved egg in the Jardin des plantes.  The fearless reporter is soon lending her support to Inspector Caponi and his assistant Justin de Saint-Hubert in a desperate attempt to capture the terrifying airborne killer before it wreaks havoc across the capital...