Linkshoch Wonderful Movie

Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

mintho This movie has one of the worst adapted scripts I've ever seen. To be honest, I've never read any original novel, so maybe it would be easier to follow the movie for me if I did, but that can't be the objective of any film. The movie has a lot of things going for it. It has nice costumes and sets and it really delivers this 1900 atmosphere. Plus, the idea of a gentleman thief could really be promising. But oh my god, how bad is that script...It looks like they had three scripts from which they chose whatever they thought to be the best, leading to a series of events that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. All the time during this movie you keep asking yourself: How did they get there? What are they doing there? Why are they doing what they are doing?There is just too much going on. There are two girls, two villains (actually there are three, as it turns out that Beaumagnan isn't really working for the royalists) and there are at least three endings of which the final one is the most disappointing of them all. So as you can imagine, there is no time to properly introduce all the characters, let alone develop the different strands of the plot.

rjeujune This is the worst treatment of the books I've ever seen ! It's tripe from start to finish, except for Kristin Scott Thomas' interpretation of the Cagliostro.As someone who read all the books as a youngster, I can tell you they are much, much better than this. So was the French serial with Georges Descarrères (not sure of the last name).Frankly, the only thing that disappointed me more was the French rendition of the Fantômas movies with Louis de Funès and Jean Marais, of all people! Don't bother watching this. Get the serial. You won't be sorry.

Paolo A. Gardinali Salomé's "Arsène Lupin" is a great divertissement. Definitely an update of the LeBlanc Lupin, with an eye on Monkey Punch's "Rupan San Se" (and Miyazaki's too, as Cagliostro's grand daughter is one of the characters. Salomé's (and Roman Duris') Lupin is _definitely_ the XXI century Lupin 1st, and in many ways it portrays the character as it should have been, rather than the Casanova softie of the seventies TV show interpreted by George Descrières.Yes, plenty of suspension of disbelief is needed, and there was enough material here to make at least two slower paced movies, which I would have personally preferred, and which would probably have happened with overseas budgets. And the plot does makes sense (well, most of the time) but it's not for everybody: some attention needs to be paid to the details. Of course this movie won't work in the US: the director does not remind all the time who the characters are with flashbacks and voice overs, so this practice excludes pretty much that 90% of US movie audience which seems to suffer from ADD. Oh, and the bad guy sets a disabled individual on fire and tosses him out of a window, which pretty much guarantees PC police censorship too.For all the Lupin aficionados, or for people who have just known the manga/anime interpretation of the (grandson) character, this is highly recommended (but you need to be able at least to read French, as that's the only language in the subtitles, which are also a little incomplete). Over 2 hours just packed with action and romance, and good music too.

writers_reign As is often the way if you try to be everything to everyone you wind up being nothing to no one. Assuming that we actually needed another take on this character - who, especially in France, has been as well documented on celluloid as Sherlock Holmes, Maigret, Raffles or even Tarzan - then we could have started with someone a tad more credible. Romain Duris is one of those actors (Vincent Cassell and Benoit Magimal are others) cursed or blessed depending on your point of view with a built-in insolent, arrogant expression that probably makes certain females roll over and play dead but makes me reach for the sick bag. The script does him no favours by jumping about like a Time Traveller and invoking echoes of The Maltese Falcon and The Da Vinci Code via a Masonic cum Knights of Templar outfit and crucifixes instead of black birds. On balance it's risible more than thrilling and/or scary which is the wrong response to this type of fare. As others have remarked here the viewer is constantly conscious of time passing non-fruitfully.