France Five Review

Jushi Sentai France Five

General Info
Glou Man Chou, ruler of the planet Lexos, desires to conquer the Earth, but is kept from sending the bulk of his armies to our planet by a protective barrier generated by the Eiffel Tower. So instead he sends his minions to try to destroy the monument to allow a full-scale invasion. Luckily, he is opposed by the local sentai, France Five, which is headed up by Professor Aristide Brugonde and his robot assist Margarine, and composed of Red Fromage/Antoine Deschaumes, Black Beaujolais/Thierry Durand, Blue Accordeon/Albert Dumas, Yellow Baguette/Jean Petri, and Pink a la Mode/Catherine Martin, as well as assisted by the enigmatic Silver Mousquetaire. They are required to pit their powers and skills against Chou’s heinous henchmen, the brutal Warduke, the seductive Extasy, and Cancrelax, who commands the magic to turn monsters into giants.

Review
France Five is simultaneously one of the cheesiest and coolest things I’ve ever seen. For the cheesiness, the string holding Warduke’s horns on is plainly seen, the costume for the Francerobo looks like they put it together out of cardboard boxes, during fights you'll see more than a couple blows that obviously missed. Things like that.

For the coolness, it’s just awesome to see a group of fans that liked the shows enough to write, design, choreograph and shoot their own. But it’s also awesome that the people involved evolved and improved upon their ideas and designs as the mini-series progressed. Compare the team’s helmets and costumes in the first episode to the ones in the second, for the most obvious example, but there's also the Francerobo's new look after a couple episodes, and Toxicostreum and Pyrostreum are worlds beyond the monster design in the first episode. The show is still kind threadbare and its nature as an amateur effort is always evident, but this is a fun thing to watch from start to finish. It's an excellent homage to classic sentai, while incorporating elements from the best newer ones as well. There's even a "pink ranger in a series of costumes" sequence late into the series.

The fight choreography and original music aren’t quite as good what you’d see and hear in a professional sentai show, but both are dang good for an amateur project. The writing is cute and clever, however, and easily matches its televised counterparts. I thought Black's angst in the third show was well-portrayed, the subplot about Red and Silver having a shared past was nicely rendered as well, even with the state of my French. In another episode I had to watch the scene with Warduke and the goon squad dancing to YMCA three times before I could go on with the episode. That was an excellent little bit of comedic scripting.

France Five won’t floor anyone from a technical standpoint, but that’s not to say it isn’t loads of fun. It is, even in the first episode where everything looks especially rough. I’m proud of the devotion and technical skill it took to produce a sentai series without the backing of a major studio, and I think every sentai fan would find it worth their while to check this mini-series out.

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