Film — The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

For someone who announced his retirement a few years ago, Luc Besson remains remarkably active...

The 30th Cambridge Film Festival opened with his latest film, an adaptation of a 1970s bande dessinée about the eponymous Adèle, who is an Edwardian Lara Croft, with a touch of Tintin, in a turn of the century Paris, populated mainly by bumbling gentlemen with florid moustaches and ghastly haircuts. And, for reasons that become apparent as the film progresses, a rapacious pterodactyl which serves as the maguffin.

For a comedy adventure, the humour is uneven, sometimes leaden, some gags are over used (the rule of three is callously disregarded at times), sometimes a little too knowing (in the form of a certain quip about a change in the Parisian landscape that post-dates the original publication), but in the main, works.

Two strikes against the film -- an anachronistic attitude to tobacco (fixable by tweaking one line of dialog), and two uses of bullet time.

Oh -- and you do have to stay through the credits for this one.