The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I only discovered this wonderful film this year when it was added to the iTunes library. While Apple frequently manages to deleteriously re-crop movies or otherwise bungle them, it did a good job adding the uncensored "Director's Cut" of this movie. I always prefer subtitled versions to the dubbed ones and this one was no exception. Most of the other reviewers here have noted the film's strengths -- brilliant casting, a fun-filled "Indiana Jones"-type adventure, creative special effects -- so I won't repeat those. (I will say that the most vehement critics seem to have come to the movie with a lot of preconceived expectations, rather than simply let the film be the lighthearted live-action cartoon that it is.) I do have a question for the French speakers out there: What is Adele saying to the horses blocking her cab in Parisian traffic as she returns home with the mummy? The rant is the only place without subtitles in English. My high-school French, while helpful with confirming some aspects of the translation, doesn't cover that outburst. I presume it must be obscene, but I'd like to know what it says.Merci beaucoup!

You have a writer who is desperate to save her sister, now that's a simple summation, but this movie is way more than that! On the surface, we're going female-centric Indiana Jones territory, but nope, you've already been fooled! Adele Blanc-Sec is way less scrupulous than Jones, and she doesn't even come close to the rules! Then we're in an early 20th century Jurassic Park and...nope, you're fooled again! We have shenanigans going on in Paris, we have authorities humorously passing the buck, down the chain of command, we have a not-so-intrepid inspector, a clueless game hunter, a lovelorn buffoon and a very weird professor who are all orbiting Adele, and she plays off of them very nicely, with spunk, guts, and a fair amount of snark. On the surface this shouldn't work, too many different things going to be contained by the storyline, but they make it work! Louise Bourgoin steals the show as Adele, and she is tough as nails, witty and utterly adorable. Somehow, she makes this all work. Now I don't speak French, but several people have said she's a terrible actress, but she made me believe she was who she was supposed to be, and seemed quite natural. Supposedly, this is the first part of a trilogy, so get cracking on the sequel!!

THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADELE BLANC-SEC is the latest movie from the normally reliable French director Luc Besson, and sad to say it's a complete piece of nonsense. Apparently the big-screen adaptation of some popular French comic books, this sees the titular character embarking on a whimsical fantasy adventure involving dinosaurs and mummies.It's as silly as it sounds, but I had hoped for some exotic, globe-trotting intrigue - after all, we mustn't forget that the French are the ones who brought us the wonderful TINTIN comics, after all. But this turns out to be an oddball affair through and through, with the humour aimed at a distinctly juvenile audience and yet adult scenes elsewhere.Sadly, this is one of those films that delights in sub-par CGI animation, so the pterodactyl scenes are pretty naffy. The nadir comes with a pair of CGI animated gorillas - don't expect RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES style quality here, these two are horrendous and it makes me wonder about the state of film-making when it's cheaper to animate two gorillas than to simply visit the zoo and film them with a traditional camera.There are many familiar French faces in the cast, including Mathieu Amalric (MUNICH) and Giles Lellouche (POINT BLANK), but most play caricatures hidden beneath prosthetics and make-up. Louise Bourgoin's titular heroine is a real bitch of a character, somebody who's rude and hateful to everybody around her, so that makes her hard to warm to. In fact, the only stuff I enjoyed in this film were the reanimated mummies, who are genuinely funny and wacky creations. Everything else is a chore.

In 1911, in Paris, the bold journalist Adèle Blanc-Sec (Louise Bourgoin) is assigned by her editor to travel to Peru to write about the Incas, but she goes to Egypt instead to seek out the mummy of a doctor of Ramses II to bring him to Paris. Adèle has an agreement with Professor Marie-Joseph Espérandieu (Jacky Nercessian) that has the ability of bringing the dead back to life to resurrect the doctor to heel her twin sister Agathe Blanc-Sec (Laure de Clermont), who has been catatonic and paraplegic for five years due to an accident caused by Adèle. However, Professor Espérandieu is arrested in prison and sentenced to death after bringing to life a pterodactyl from an ancient egg in Louvre that caused the death of three persons. Now the last hope of Agathe is that Adèle saves Professor Espérandieu from the guillotine."Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec" is a highly entertaining and funny adventure by Luc Besson. Last week, I was zapping the television and I saw the last part of the adventure of Adèle Blanc- Sec. Today I have just watched this movie on DVD with my family and we really enjoyed the story. The weird and bizarre characters slightly recall the surrealism of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet in "Delicatessen and "La Cité des Enfants Perdus". My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "As Múmias do Faraó"("The Mummies of the Pharaoh")