Michel Vaillant

Michel Vaillant is a champion racing driver whose team, the Vaillante outfit, has dominated rallying and circuit racing around the world. That run of success has bred as much resentment as admiration, and the rival Leader team is determined to end it. Its manager, Ruth Wong, is driven by a personal motive: she wants to settle a score tied to the memory of her father, the founder of Leader, and she is prepared to go to considerable lengths to beat Vaillant. The confrontation comes to a head at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, where Vaillant and his American teammate Steve Warson line up against the Leader cars.

Directed by Louis-Pascal Couvelaire, the film was written by Gilles Malençon with Luc Besson, produced by Pierre-Ange Le Pogam and released in 2003. It adapts the long-running French comic series about the character. Sagamore Stévenin plays Michel Vaillant, with Peter Youngblood Hills as Warson, Diane Kruger as Julie Wood, Jean-Pierre Cassel as Henri Vaillant and Philippe Bas as Jean-Pierre Vaillant. The production had a budget of roughly 23 million dollars.

Audience response has been muted: on TMDB it holds a rating of 5.4 out of 10 from 178 votes, which suggests the film found only a limited following.