Les Chevaliers du ciel (2005)

Les Chevaliers du ciel is a French action film first released in 2005, directed by Gérard Pirès.  The film stars Benoît Magimel, Clovis Cornillac, Géraldine Pailhas, Philippe Torreton and Rey Reyes.  It has also been released under the title: Sky Fighters.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


During an air display at Farnborough, a Mirage 2000 jet goes off the radar.  Two French fighter pilots, Antoine Marchelli and Sébastien Vallois, are sent to intercept the plane.  They locate it over the North Sea.  Seeing that the Mirage is about to open fire on his colleague’s plane, Antoine has no choice but to shoot it down.  On his return to base, Antoine is informed that the Mirage was taking part in a top secret anti-terrorist exercise and that his action has caused the death of a pilot in the French Air Force.   No one seems to want to hear Antoine’s account of what  happened and the pilot soon begins to suspect that he has been set up.  But by whom – and for what purpose...?

Rightly or wrongly, Gérard Pirès is best known for directing the first – and best – of the Luc Besson produced Taxi films, which are some of the most successful action films to have been made in France.   In Les Chevaliers du ciel, Pirès finds himself once more in the driving seat of a juggernaut of an action film and gets to realise every director’s dream, playing with some of the most expensive military hardware on the planet – all paid for by the French tax payer.

With its hackneyed characterisation and slightly ludicrous plot, Les Chevaliers du ciel looks as if it may have been inspired by a strip cartoon.  In fact, it was!  The film is based on Les Aventures de Tanguy et Laverdure, a series of comic book adventures by Jean-Michel Charlier and Albert Uderzo, published between 1959 and 1971.  Somehow knowing this fact makes the film somewhat more bearable, and if you happen to be acquainted with Tanguy and Laverdure, as every self-respecting schoolboy of a certain generation should be, there can be positively no excuse for not watching it.

The pairing of actors of the calibre of Benoît Magimel and Clovis Cornillac (two of the biggest stars in French cinema today) is certainly a casting coup, although you do wonder whether the film needs it.  What most grabs our attention are not the performances (which for the most part are diminished by some trashy dialogue) but the pacy action sequences – particularly the stunning aerial shots which are, quite literally, breathtaking.  The latter rival anything you will find in a contemporary Hollywood blockbuster, in style and impact if not in scale.  Anyone who enjoyed Pirès’s Taxi film will assuredly relish this exhilarating spectacle of high octane escapist nonsense.

© James Travers 2008

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