What a deeply peculiar movie. In concept, in story, in casting and execution, it is just
odd. Even odder, I imagine, for me than for audiences who got to see it in the original French, since I saw dubbed into English -- with Mandarin subtitles. So yeah. Peculiar.
Our story centers around intrepid reporter Adèle Blanc-Sec (Louise Bourgoin), one of your Rachel-Weisz-in-THE MUMMY-type lady explorers from the very early 20th Century. She has a catatonic sister, a biting sense of humor and a bizarre agenda. There is also some grave robbing, a pterodactyl, blundering French bureaucrats, the least secure prison ever captured on film (seriously, and I thought the city of Townsville's jail was easy to escape) and necromancy. Of mummies.
Adèle herself is a madwoman, charming in an arrogant, dismissive and eminently self-serving way. She is brave to the point of foolhardiness, and is very, very beautiful. But definitely mad. Anyone who could so cavalierly rob a Pharaoh's tomb and then get up close and personal with a mummy in a sarcophagus is well, impressively single-minded is one way to put it. Crazily obsessed would be another.
In love with Adèle is brilliant young scientist Andrej Zborowski (Nicolas Giraud), who knows a thing or two about pterodactyls (I mentioned the pterodactyl, right?), and enables one of the coolest scenes in the movie: Adèle flying above Paris on one. In fact, the shots of the pterodactyl at large above Gay Paree are universally pleasing, and make up for much that is unsatisfactory elsewhere in the film.
One of the biggest failings of Adèle is the truly dire manner in which it tries so valiantly to make us laugh. Maybe it's a failure of translation, maybe it's just that, as Harry from DUMB AND DUMBER would have it, "the French are assholes", but for the most part, the jokes fall flat and the broad and obvious characterization of some of the movie's more tiresome presences -- the greedy detective, Caponi (Gilles Lellouche), the icky rival treasure hunter, Dieuleveult (Mathieu Amalric), the ridiculous big game hunter de Saint-Hubert (Jean-Paul Rouve), the comedy drunkard Choupard (Serge Bagdassarian) -- are simply groan-inducing.
The only saving graces of this movie, apart from the pterodactyl, are the reanimated mummy Patmosis (Régis Royer) -- and, yes, obviously the mummy gets reanimated, it's right there in the title, Spoiler Nazis! -- and the titular Adèle, although even she, at times, falls victim to an overwhelming need to employ some unbearable puns.
Much of the problem here may, of course, lie in the fact that these lines are delivered in accents other than the ones in which there were intended to be heard. Can I just say, here and now, how much I hate dubbed movies? (Wait, why am I asking? It's my review: of course I can!) So I hate dubbed movies. Sure, I get why such is necessary in a children's movie but if this is truly supposed to be a children's movie, then the entirety of France's youth should be put into protective custody immediately. Because this is not a movie for the young (Adele smokes and gets naked; sometimes, both at once) and yet, it's not terribly grown up either. I don't really get who this movie was made for at all, really. Or, indeed, why it was made at all.
Much as I have adored Luc Besson's work in the past, I must say that this one is what the kids nowadays call an Epic Fail. Although I did appreciate what I can only hope was a call back to his masterpiece, THE FIFTH ELEMENT, with one of Adele's faithful Egyptian guides being named Aziz. ("Aziz, light!") Unless that name comes from the original graphic novel, of course, and I am giving Besson too much credit for cleverness.
Which, after this truly befuddling exercise in cinematic oddity, I don't know that I shall be inclined to do ever again.
The review first appeared in Geek Speak Magazine: geekspeakmagazine (dot) com.
Our story centers around intrepid reporter Adèle Blanc-Sec (Louise Bourgoin), one of your Rachel-Weisz-in-THE MUMMY-type lady explorers from the very early 20th Century. She has a catatonic sister, a biting sense of humor and a bizarre agenda. There is also some grave robbing, a pterodactyl, blundering French bureaucrats, the least secure prison ever captured on film (seriously, and I thought the city of Townsville's jail was easy to escape) and necromancy. Of mummies.
Adèle herself is a madwoman, charming in an arrogant, dismissive and eminently self-serving way. She is brave to the point of foolhardiness, and is very, very beautiful. But definitely mad. Anyone who could so cavalierly rob a Pharaoh's tomb and then get up close and personal with a mummy in a sarcophagus is well, impressively single-minded is one way to put it. Crazily obsessed would be another.
In love with Adèle is brilliant young scientist Andrej Zborowski (Nicolas Giraud), who knows a thing or two about pterodactyls (I mentioned the pterodactyl, right?), and enables one of the coolest scenes in the movie: Adèle flying above Paris on one. In fact, the shots of the pterodactyl at large above Gay Paree are universally pleasing, and make up for much that is unsatisfactory elsewhere in the film.
One of the biggest failings of Adèle is the truly dire manner in which it tries so valiantly to make us laugh. Maybe it's a failure of translation, maybe it's just that, as Harry from DUMB AND DUMBER would have it, "the French are assholes", but for the most part, the jokes fall flat and the broad and obvious characterization of some of the movie's more tiresome presences -- the greedy detective, Caponi (Gilles Lellouche), the icky rival treasure hunter, Dieuleveult (Mathieu Amalric), the ridiculous big game hunter de Saint-Hubert (Jean-Paul Rouve), the comedy drunkard Choupard (Serge Bagdassarian) -- are simply groan-inducing.
The only saving graces of this movie, apart from the pterodactyl, are the reanimated mummy Patmosis (Régis Royer) -- and, yes, obviously the mummy gets reanimated, it's right there in the title, Spoiler Nazis! -- and the titular Adèle, although even she, at times, falls victim to an overwhelming need to employ some unbearable puns.
Much of the problem here may, of course, lie in the fact that these lines are delivered in accents other than the ones in which there were intended to be heard. Can I just say, here and now, how much I hate dubbed movies? (Wait, why am I asking? It's my review: of course I can!) So I hate dubbed movies. Sure, I get why such is necessary in a children's movie but if this is truly supposed to be a children's movie, then the entirety of France's youth should be put into protective custody immediately. Because this is not a movie for the young (Adele smokes and gets naked; sometimes, both at once) and yet, it's not terribly grown up either. I don't really get who this movie was made for at all, really. Or, indeed, why it was made at all.
Much as I have adored Luc Besson's work in the past, I must say that this one is what the kids nowadays call an Epic Fail. Although I did appreciate what I can only hope was a call back to his masterpiece, THE FIFTH ELEMENT, with one of Adele's faithful Egyptian guides being named Aziz. ("Aziz, light!") Unless that name comes from the original graphic novel, of course, and I am giving Besson too much credit for cleverness.
Which, after this truly befuddling exercise in cinematic oddity, I don't know that I shall be inclined to do ever again.
The review first appeared in Geek Speak Magazine: geekspeakmagazine (dot) com.