Blu-ray Review: The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec

This Blu-ray represents the U.S. premiere of a film Luc Besson directed in 2010. The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec is based on a a comic book, though not the same comic book as La Vie D’Adele which was also a graphic novel. Adele Blanc-Sec is sort of a French female Indiana Jones but it’s far less of an action-adventure and more of a whimsical fantasy comedy.

Adele (Louise Bourgoin) explores a booby trapped pharaoh’s tomb while a pterodactyl flies around Paris making trouble. The ancient Egyptian doctor may provide the key to curing Adele’s sister, paralyzed from a head injury, the likes of which there’s still no cure for in real medical science today, let alone 1911. That head injury is pretty macabre too. As humorously as they portray it, I still couldn’t stop thinking about Terry Schiavo. Sorry.

I would have preferred if Adele’s Extraordinary Adventures involved more globe trotting and tomb raiding, but the mummies waking up in Paris and pterodactyl flying around are fun too. Adele is a good character, a strong woman as Besson likes to portray and even more impressive for the era in which the film is set. After she returns from Egypt, Adele spends most of the film dealing with a professor she needs who’s arrested for the destruction the pterodactyl caused when no one believes there’s a pterodactyl. It’s more of a comedic misadventure, in which Adele wears many adorable and elaborate disguises, with a lot of special effects caused by the magic of the MacGuffins. It’s very French in tone, more Jean-Pierre Jeunet than Luc Besson but a little Fifth Element if that’s your frame of reference.

The mummies speak French pretty well, not that it’s the kind of movie where you’re worried about historical accuracy. It’s definitely a better mummy movie than The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. I give them credit. If you’re doing a movie about mummies waking up in Paris, the film really gives you mummies waking up in Paris. A lot of fantasy movies promise one thing and then try as hard as they can to shoehorn the story around the one special effect they can pull off. Adele Blanc-Sec gives you all the mummies and pterodactyl rampage it promises.

The visual effects are respectable with CGI characters on par with the better Hollywood movies. That is to say, you know you’re looking at computer effects, but the pterodactyl and mummy are really good visual effects. They look photoreal and the light of the scene affects them accurately, though it’s not going to fool you into wondering, “However did they get a real pterodactyl to fly around?”

We’ve got a few bonus features on the Blu-ray. There’s a 26 minute behind the scenes documentary in French. Two minutes of deleted scenes show four episodes of Adele and her sister getting into mischief. The two where they’re little girls are truly adorable. Another short two-minute featurette shows Bourgoin in the recording studio for the film’s song.

It’s nice to see Besson directing in the genre again, although his historical drama The Lady was quite good, and the more guerrilla style Angel-A was a kick too. Adele Blanc-Sec is more in the realm of lavish epic moviemaking like The Fifth Element, The Big Blue, and to some extent the grittier versions in La Femme Nikita and The Professional. It is blatantly set up for a sequel, which is just fine because I imagine there was more than one comic book too. The sequel would presumably tie Adele much more to real historical events, which I’m not sure is as good an idea as it sounds, but maybe Besson will just produce the sequel and get Olivier Megaton to direct it anyway. 


Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.

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