Dracula: A Love Tale (2025)

In a more honest world, this would be titled “Luc Besson’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula By Yet Another Guy Who Didn’t Read The Damn Book”.

Given how much this attempts to rip off Coppola’s version of Dracula in places, this should be a nice way for the old vintner to recoup some of those Megalopolis losses. But then, I wouldn’t want to be connected to Besson’s movie-shaped object either, even for a lot of money, so Besson is probably save. When I say Besson rips off Coppola, I actually mean to say he tries to remake Coppola’s Dracula, but apparently can’t recreate anything of that movie’s idiosyncratic vision of never contained horniness, mood of gothic excess, or visual and stylistic pull.

Everything taken from other sources here is like a bad xerox copy, a shadow that only reminds us of other films that made the same thing but with artistic intent and vision, or at least a hold on simple craftsmanship.

The things Besson adds are goofy, inane and just plain stupid – I’ve been arguing that Besson simply either isn’t very bright or believes his audiences aren’t for years – to a degree that should actually make the film enjoyable as the product of someone’s rampaging Id (somewhat like Argento’s version of Dracula, which I genuinely enjoy and thus prefer to this one). After all, this is a film that replaces the standard sexy vampire brides with crappy CGI gargoyles, has a time-skipping montage during which Dracula invents a rape, sorry, seduction perfume that causes women to find Dracula irresistible and to break out in musical numbers you have to see to believe, and features a tower of horny nuns, so it should at least be more than a little entertaining. Unfortunately, apart from the few moments of insanity, this is simply dull, leadenly paced – there’s no reason for this to be more than two hours long, seventy minutes feel about right – and for most of its running time simply lacks what saved some of Besson’s other, just as deeply stupid, films from being boring: visual imagination.

DogMan (2023)

Douglas, more typically known as (the) Dogman (Caleb Landry Jones), is arrested by the police while he’s driving a truck full of dogs, wearing a dress drenched in blood. He’s also paraplegic (as it turns out, in a variation readymade for melodrama). In interviews with a police psychiatrist (Jojo T. Gibbs), he starts recounting his peculiar life story, and how it eventually led him to where the film begins.

Caged together with the dogs of his abusive father, he developed and early affinity with the animals that apparently resulted in an ability to speak to dogs so they understand every word he says. Further misadventures eventually find Douglas moving into a proper lair with his gang of dog pound dogs. From there he makes money for dog food by working as a dog-based fixer/vigilante in the Equalizer manner (more Woodward than Washington), and a drag performer in a club. He also has his dog buddies steal jewellery from the houses of the rich. Eventually, the dangers of these combined professions and his general loneliness take their toll. Christ symbolism will be involved.

Most of the films Luc Besson has made in the last decade or so have been terrible - stupid in all the wrong ways and typically lacking in any conviction. Conviction is something DogMan has in spades.

This is a film that carries its inherent weirdness with seriousness and dignity. There’s not a single shot here that suggests Besson thinks the amount of outsider signifiers he’s saddled his protagonist with is a bit silly, no irony, no attempt at distancing himself from the weird and the improbable. Rather, this is a film that looks you straight in the eye and challenges you to take it seriously on exactly the level it has decided on; thus, there’s no weird for weird’s sake freakishness involved here at all, but a sense of a director speaking about things that are actually important to him in a way that’s completely him, utterly unembarrassed.

It succeeds wonderfully, for suddenly, Besson isn’t the hack director going through the motions anymore we’ve known for a while, but again one who uses heightened intensities, realities and stakes as his form of expression, and uses the genre combination of what is situated somewhere between a weird vigilante movie, a curious drama, and an out-there superhero origin story to speak of the feeling of being an outsider, of loneliness, and of the breaks caused by abuse that never heal in a way that feels utterly genuine.

In Jones, Besson has found a congenital partner. There’s a lack of irony and distance in his performance that utterly destroys any possibility to read this as a film about a freak we’re meant to gawk at; in his perfectly unreal and unrealistic surroundings, Jones reaches for simple and clear, yet dramatically heightened, humanity and doesn’t make more of a show out of it than the film he’s in needs. Which is rather a lot, obviously.

That DogMan also contains a couple of dog-based heist sequences which easily beat The Doberman Gang is another point in its favour.

In short: Anna (2019)

I’ve been making fun of Luc Besson for decades now, but despite all of his flaws as a screenwriter, I’ve always taken him for a highly talented director, hell, even writer, just one who tends to be a bit lazier than he should or could be, ambitious in a sometimes self-sabotaging way, and a bit of a goofball. Who couldn’t identify with that? It’s just that most of us goofy nerds don’t get big money to bring our bad and not so bad ideas on screen, sometimes featuring major actors.

After watching Anna, however, I’m not so sure about the writer/director/producer anymore; perhaps some of us have just always cut a lazy hack too much slack and turned him into a misguided talent in our heads? Be that as it may, Anna is a full-grown catastrophe of a movie, featuring a model in the title role who can’t act, supported by a group of pros – Helen “I had a Russian grandmother” Mirren, Cillian “Like, totally American” Murphy and Luke “I am even more Russian” Evans – doing terrible accents who supposedly can act (but you wouldn’t notice), moving back and forth through a plot that is at once bland, tedious, and of course in classic Besson style dumb as a rock. Because this is a bit of a backdoor remake of Red Sparrow (but crap), the film is also full of increasingly tedious plot twists it spends an improbable amount of time explaining to the dumbest person in the audience, killing the little bit of forward momentum a film with an uninvolving story about a character without character traits can have, not once, not twice, but thrice.

Also adding to the pain are modelling sequences (fun fact: no film ever needs more than zero of those), amateurishly staged action sequences that don’t even bother to film around the fact that lead Sasha Luss clearly has even less experience as a screen fighter than she has as an actress. I’m perfectly alright with directors casting their leads on account of their cheekbones instead of their ability as actors/actresses, but directors not named Besson generally put some effort in improving their amateur actor’s game, whereas Anna seems to go out of its way to make the poor girl’s acting look as badly as possible. But then, this is a film that doesn’t get a good performance out of Helen Mirren, so what do I expect?


There’s some in theory half interesting thematic business about female freedom and independence (hello again, Red Sparrow) but that’s more or less completely sabotaged by Besson’s inability to give Anna any kind of psychology, let’s not even hope for any sort of personality. There’s nothing there, really, and unlike with old school Besson, there’s no style to become substance or at least distract from its absence here, leaving Anna empty and not even pretty to look at.

Three Films Make A Post: Boy meets girl, girl unimpressed, boy starts band

The Conjuring 2 (2016): By now, I don’t think James Wan’s idea of what is terrifying and my own will ever converge, unless I’ll ever be converted to the gospel of the jump scare as the most important thing in any horror movie. Otherwise, it’s the usual Wan stuff: high technical abilities put into the service of delivering jump scare after jump scare after jump scare (which generally works on me for half an hour and then quickly becomes annoying) and a script whose only substance is some generic Christian demon stuff, a bit of whining about sceptics, and some advertisements for Bill and Lorraine Warren, whose film versions are still the blandest yet supremely sanctimonious psychic investigators alive, seeing as their only character trait is being holy. To me, Wan’s movies are the emptiest of empty spectacle, that is to say, spectacle I can’t even enjoy as spectacle because I find it utterly uninvolving. Of course, given who well these things sell and how much lots of horror fans and critics love them, they must work better for others.

Goosebumps (2015): To reiterate that I do indeed enjoy me some spectacle, take this family friendly horror comedy by Rob Letterman based on the books by R.L. Stine, who also appears as a character played by a Jack Black who for once doesn’t seem to be playing his Jack Black persona. It’s deeply harmless, loud, and fast fun with competent young actors, lots and lots of CGI monsters, and not too many scenes of people learning valuable lessons to annoy me. There’s never a boring moment, likeable characters who don’t get into speeches about God at the slightest provocation and also don’t look as if they were at a 70s themed costume party. Even better: most of the ideas the film comes up with are actually fun and clever, with many a call-back to horror classics (and I suppose Stine’s work, though I can’t say I have any personal experience with it), even most of the jokes don’t seem to be written down to some assumed brain-dead twelve year old. If I had kids, I’d absolutely tie them to a chair to watch this with me.

The Family (2013): But then, I also mostly enjoyed this very violent comedy with Robert de Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer as the parents of a psychopathically inclined mafia family in witness protection under the tutelage of a typically grumpy Tommy Lee Wallace in France, as directed by Luc Besson. To my own surprise and confusion, I found myself laughing a lot, despite my usual reaction to humour in Besson’s films being along the lines of running away screaming. Of course, part of the film’s charm are meta moments like the scene where de Niro’s and Wallace’s characters are witnessing a screening of Goodfellas (in my book probably the best gangster film ever made with or without de Niro), which of course results in some tearful reminiscing by de Niro’s character. Otherwise, there’s quite a bit of humorous ultra-violence, and jokes that reach from the dubious to the stupid, all filmed by Besson with his typical relish.


The moral of the story seems to be that Americans are dangerous lunatics, but families are good, though I might be wrong.

Past Misdeeds: Adèle Blanc-Sec

aka The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

Original title: Les Aventures Extraordinaires D'Adèle Blanc-Sec

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Journalist and adventurer Adèle Blanc-Sec (Louise Bourgoin) is adventuring in Egypt. The young woman is attempting to steal the mummy of Patmosis, the personal physician of Ramses II. Adèle's not in it for money or fame, though. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Adèle is trying to acquire Patmosis so that her friend, the elderly - and nutty - professor Esperandieu (Jacky Nercessian) can revive the dead guy with his enormous mind powers. The newly alive Patmosis, or so Adèle hopes, will then use the superior medical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians to cure her sister, who has been lying in a waking coma ever since a very unfortunate tennis/hatpin accident (for which Adèle feels guilty) five years ago. Acquiring the mummy needs all of Adèle's (also quite enormous) powers of sarcasm and adventuring, but evading a nasty French government agent and gaining possession of the dead doctor is only the beginning of what the young writer will have to do to save her sister.

While Adèle was away, Professor Esperandieu has decided that it's a good idea to make a test run of his revivification process, and has induced a pterodactyl to claw itself out of an egg in the Museum of Natural History. Unfortunately, the dinosaur is rather cross with the world at large, and causes the death of a state minister and his dancehall singer lover, a deed for which the police soon hold the old man responsible. Consequently, when Adèle returns to Paris, Esperandieu is soon to be executed.

Of course, little things like a prison break or a pterodactyl can't stand between a woman and the life of her sister.

Between producing and writing every action movie from Europe made in the last ten years, Luc Besson has somehow found the time to direct this adaptation of a series of critically well-loved comics by Jacques Tardi. Having mostly grown up on US comics, I have never read any of Tardi's Adèle Blanc-Sec stories (though I'll probably catch up on them through the new Fantagraphics translations), so you won't hear anything about the terrible things Besson might or might not have done to my childhood with his film. I suspect the director/writer took a lot of liberties with his source material - at least nothing I have read about the first two albums of the comic mentions anything about a sister in a coma (I know, I know, it's serious). This gives me the freedom to just shrug about the quality of the adaptation and watch the pretty, moving pictures in this case.

Tonally, Adèle is quite a comedic film, dominated by a sense of humour that vacillates between the silly, the stupid, and the delightfully whimsical, with the whimsical and the silly having a boxing match for domination into which the stupid blunders from time to time in form of "hilarious" policemen of the fat sheriff archetype and hunters as we know them from Monty Python sketches. But for every joke about a pterodactyl shitting on someone's head, there are three or four actually funny ones, so that's rather alright with me.

Mostly, Besson shows the right sort of comedic timing, seldom staying in one place too long for it to become annoying. Although, truth be told, I could have gone with one or two "funny" disguises less in Adèle's failed attempts at breaking Esperandieu out of prison, especially because the way she actually manages to get the Professor out is much funnier and much more fun than the disguises are.

Between the jokes, the film does feature some fine, entertaining moments of adventure, rather like what I'd imagine a fourth Indiana Jones movie made by people who still know the difference between good, entertaining randomness and doddering idiocy would have included. Speaking of the film that doesn't exist, Adele's CGI effects are also a lot better than those found there (though not perfect, as the conceptually best moment of pterodactyl adventuring will prove), even though I really don't know why you'd want to realize a walking mummy through CGI instead of make-up. But the effect is good enough, if you are willing to accept it for what it is, and who am I to stand between myself and my own entertainment through walking mummies?

I was also positively surprised by the easiness with which Besson - whose output in the last decade hasn't shown any interest in women in his movies beyond the "looking pretty" or "to be rescued" parts - concentrates on a female hero whose competence and heroism isn't treated as anything special "for a woman" (yet still as something pretty special "for a person"); all men in the movie are either mummies, or clowns, or just minor characters anyway.

It certainly helps Besson's case here that Louise Bourgoin is quite effortlessly capable to carry the movie with a performance that is at once energetic and charming, and holds herself against good jokes and bad, pterodactyls, mummies, and pantomime villains. Bourgoin is in fact so central to the film that the only scenes that don't work at all are those in which she isn't on screen. It's enough to make a boy infatuated.

As is, now that I think about it, the whole film she's starring in.

In short: The Fifth Element (1997)

Original title: Le cinquième élément

It’s easy and often enjoyable to make fun of Luc Besson and his obsession with films not making any logical sense whatsoever, his loathing for the laws of physics even when a scene has no need to ignore them, and his painful, weaponized idea of humour. However, when the man is on as a director, he is on, while still keeping all of these weaknesses alive.

The Fifth Element might very well be Besson’s magnum opus (though I’m more partial to his Jacques Tardi adaptation about the adventure of Adèle Blanc-Sec because there, Besson seems to have had more control over his most grating obsessions, though this one is certainly the more pure dose of Besson), a film that adds the love for French science fiction comics and Bruce Willis to a mix I find at once exhilarating and incredibly annoying. It certainly isn’t a film to watch when you have a migraine, for most of its running time consists of Besson using all his considerable visual powers and a very French concept of weirdness to screech nonsense into your ears while throwing the most incredible candy coloured lysergic images at your eyes. At its best, this means the film very authentically portrays a preposterous yet utterly beautiful looking future where clearly everybody has been driven completely insane by their surroundings; at its worst, this means Chris Tucker playing a guy named Ruby Rhod making high pitched noises forever.

Parts of Besson’s decisions are as bizarre as ever. Let’s just look at the cast: Bruce Willis as air taxi driver and space marine certainly makes sense (particularly since the guy never had much of problem making light of his own hard ass image), but why cast Milla Jovovich who can’t act her way out of a paper bag instead of a just as attractive actress who can (wait for it) act? Is the short guffaw of seeing Tiny Lister as The President (we are never quite sure of what exactly) really worth the fact that he’s going to be pretty bad in what is a considerably larger role than a cameo? Why Chris Tucker? No, seriously, why Chris Tucker of all the unfunny professional funnymen on Earth? And what’s up with Gary Oldman’s accent?

And on it goes with one bizarre decision after the next. The funny thing is, at least every second time I watch The Fifth Element I’m having a wonderful time with it, falling into its mix of beauty and nonsense like into…well, whatever piece of furniture is very loud and annoying yet awesome. It’s certainly not a film for every opportunity (but which one is?) - it is much too idiosyncratic, annoying and strange for that, but when the opportunity for it arises, it is glorious.

Lucy (2014)

A series of unfortunate events starting with a bad choice in boyfriends leads American-in-Taiwan Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) onto the road to become an involuntary drug mule for South Korean drug kingpin (I assume) Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik). When more unfortunate events bring the experimental drug she’s smuggling from her stomach into her blood stream, Lucy starts to develop better superpowers than you get from being bitten by a radioactive spider. Lucy becomes able to use ever more of her brain capacity, using the 90 percent of the human brain we can’t access according to the bullshit science of the script (seriously, people, I know that’s a much-loved bit of nonsense, but it’s nonsense nonetheless). From then on, the plot increasingly resembles a random assortment of disconnected scenes, with nobody doing much that makes sense, neither on the level of logic nor on that of basic human psychology. Or what, just for example, is Mr. Jang’s actual motivation for his killing spree that includes basically everyone his goons encounter? Lucy for her part tries to give her increasingly superhuman knowledge to one Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman), famous neurologist (tee-hee) before she’ll die, or, as she in fact does, turn into the sort of entity that’ll make people who like some privacy for their masturbation decidedly uncomfortable.

So, as should be obvious writer/director Luc Besson still hates logic, physics, and all that comes with it. Unlike with many a EuropaCorp movie, the resulting film-like entity is quite fun too watch, probably also because it was directed by Besson himself, a man with a keen visual imagination, a classic eye for the staging of all kinds of scenes, and none of the love for video clip bullshit that can make the films of some of his protégés – like the dreaded Olivier Megaton – so difficult to stomach. Sure, neither the science nor the psychology make sense, and the film’s Big Answer to the Big Questions it is supposedly asking in those scenes where no perfectly idiotic bit of violence is happening seem to be “Time’s a bit important. I think.”, but then, I didn’t really expect Besson to make a proper philosophical SF movie, nor even a science fictional action movie with proper philosophic bits.

As nearly always with Besson’s films, it’s not the question if the film’s a mess or not, but rather if it’s a hot one or not. Lucy, fortunately, is the former, at first pretending to use its superhuman basic as an excuse to have Scarlett Johansson do a Liam Neeson (as if we needed an excuse for that, particular since she has turned out to be such an excellent Black Widow in the Marvel movies) but then quickly turning into an excuse for Besson to do the thing he’s really good at: making up weird stuff while things explode from time to time, and – in this case – Morgan Freeman pops in for a few scenes to hold a scientific lecture (not based in actual science), look wise, and manage to not break out into fits of the giggles. If you take it for what it is, Lucy really is pretty fantastic, eschewing sense for the free-floating game of associations of a very loud and flashy dream that culminates in one of the most peculiar nods to Kubrick’s 2001 you’ll ever see.

I’m happy there are many SF films that aren’t like Lucy but I’m totally fine with Lucy being as it is, in particular because it’s a film much too weird to ever bore you, and so random I find it difficult to assume even Besson did see anything that happens in it coming beyond the explosions and Johansson and Freeman putting way more effort in than their characters deserve.

Also, what the hell did I just watch?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,french movies,south korean movies,in short,sf,action,luc besson,scarlett johansson,morgan freeman,choi min-sik

On WTF: Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adele Blanc-Sec (2010)

Luc Besson takes a much needed break in his writing and producing every French action movie ever and directs, writes and produces an adaptation of a well-loved series of graphic novels by Jacques Tardi. What arises from the good man's efforts is a very silly adventure comedy I found quite irresistible.

Read more about it in my last peace of weekly blatherings on WTF-Film before my looming holiday blogging pause.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,adventure,comedy,luc besson,louise bourgoin,reviews,other places