Product: The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (Region 2) (1999)
Rating: 2.0
Burn the witch
Gosh, this film disagreed with me. Overlong, extremely shallow and with a tone that varies from comical slapstick to brutal fight sequences, watching this film at that cinema was a mind, heart and buttock-numbing exercise. Confirming the suspicion that Luc Besson is essentially a grown-up man with a child's understanding of cinema, it's stylish, inconsistent, and with no depth of any kind. The film seems like a terrible waste of talent - Jovovich's edgy, verging-on-madness portrayal of the title character, whilst never particularly subtle, nonetheless explodes with gusto, and the battle sequences are highly entertaining in a grim and gritty, post-'Excalibur' style. The rest of the film is a mess, though. Jeanne's heavenly visions contain the worst kind of cliched mid-80's pop video imagery imaginable, not a single line of dialogue stands out (except for the well-known transcriptions of Jeanne's trial, taken from court records of the time), and Eric Serra's music sounds rooted in the 1930's, when it isn't using a 'Fifth Element'-style breathy 'thrum' noise. The tone veers alarmingly - the opening sequence features Asterix-style comic English soldiers, pantomime crooked teeth and all, brutally raping and murdering Jeanne's sister. Later on, Jeanne's expedition to attack Paris is reduced to a 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'-style 'attack the castle' fiasco, whilst the ending tries a stab at indie art, with Dustin Hoffman as Jeanne's 'conscience'. And it's much too long.