Michel Vaillant

Michel Vaillant is an incredible, artistic visual feast of a film. It is the sexiest film since Top Gun and it is at once shocking, surprising, heroic and humble. A perfect marriage of big Hollywood action and French artistic quality.

I am the photo editor at two major international fashion magazines and I went together with the head designer of one of them. We were on the edge our seat throughout the film, never knowing what would come next. We appreciated the sensuality of the under-lying love story. While you knew it was there, it was not focused on, there were no gratuitous sex scenes, in fact I recall only one kiss. But you knew it was there, you could feel it from the characters, in the looks, and in the intimacy of certain moments. Visually, this film is a masterpiece blending three distinct types of cinematography. The first being standard action movie at it's best. Fast cars and big explosions. The second being raw journalism, the kind of filming you'd expect if watching a car race on television and the third being incredibly artistic, turning a single moment into several minutes, or using ultra-high contrast grainy photography to convey mood and emotion. Further, the lighting and sound of the film cannot be ignored as it was superbe. The acting will not win awards, but the actors played their rolls perfectly.

They were sexy, but humble. Gentle and caring, quietly heroic. My only issue is their solution to the problem of the actor playing Steve Watson's inability to speak French. It appears they filmed him doing his lines in English and then dubbed it over in bad French. I would have been nice to have an actor who could have spoken a little better French, but it was not overly distracting to the film as a whole. And, they were sexy. They were the dream of what a race car driver should look like, act like. Not only for women, but for men too. Makes you want to go down to the track and cheer.

I cannot comment on the film's accuracy to the race world, but then again, it is a movie, adapted from a cartoon and to that end, it is phenomenal.

Well, the movie is very well made, personally I like the car racing world, and you can see in the movie that Luc Besson is fan of cars. The script is very simple, is based on a comic, and it's not really very original, but the effects, and the way that frames were took made the movie interesting. Don't expect a kind of stuff like "the fast and the Furious" or "taxi" because the movie doesn't try to be spectacular , it trys more to find quality images. The rate I gave to the movie is a 7, and i find that the actual rate 4.5 is not enough.

(If you have played to Pro Race Driver or went to karting you will enjoy more ;)).

This movie is strangely uneven. On the one hand, all the shots on a racetrack or whenever somebody drives a car are very nicely shot and framed. But when it's a transition scene, it has the look and terrible acting of a third-zone TV feature. Some shots are not even really in focus ! Furthermore, all the post-production dubbing of the foreign actors is quite off, and the story has some big plot holes. For instance, why don't they even try to call the police ? What's left is a movie with some pretty girls, very nice cars and some good action sequences. Not that bad, but not enough to make a good movie.

I liked that movie very much. First of all - all actresses are look like models and all actors are like from Men's Health magazine, so why don't like it?

Seriously, almost all scenes shot with macro lens, and in some point of time you feel like you are in the movie or in the driver's cabin!

Nature scenes are so beautiful and fantastically looking that only rude and not romantic persons wouldn't like it.

I don't get other's comments about dubbing and acting and all that stuff, I watched it in Russian and like it, so it's not the director's fault and responsibility to translate.

And guys, what you expect from action movie - how the actors suppose to play there? Common, it's not a drama or something you don't have to make intriguing stories and unpredictable thrillers - it's just a good looking movie, watch and relax.

I can rate it at least 8 out of 10. Cheers.

The movie starts with a lot of noise and a spectacular scene. But that's about it. The story is predictable and the characters not convincing enough. In this movie are the bad guys bad, and the good ones good. No depth in any character. The scenes with the cars are spectacular and that's the only good thing about this movie.