French producer Besson guilty of plagiarising action classic

The director of "The Fifth Element" and "Nikita" had denied that his 2012 film "Lockout" copied the cult futuristic thriller in which New York's Manhattan island is a giant prison that has been overrun by its inmates.

Kurt Russell plays a government agent-turned-convict who goes inside to rescue the US president after his plane crash-lands there.

An appeals court in Paris ruled that "Lockout" had "massively borrowed key elements" of the earlier movie, according to a judgement put online Friday by BFMTV.

In "Lockout", Guy Pearce plays a wrongly convicted man who is offered his freedom if he can free the US president's daughter from a jail in outer space which its violent prisoners have taken over.

Critics have long pointed to the uncanny parallels between the two films.

Box Office magazine called "Lockout" -- which Besson wrote with Irish filmmakers Stephen St. Leger and James Mathers -- "a sleek, slick and shameless rip-off of Carpenter's 'Escape from New York'" as well as its sequel, "Escape from LA".

The Mandatory website joked that it was a "stealth remake".

But plagiarism cases in the movie business are notoriously difficult to prove, particularly as so many action and sci-fi films share similar tropes.

Carpenter, who is best known for his horror films "Halloween", "The Fog" and "The Thing", had demanded 2.2 million euros in damages ($2.4 million).

Last year the court found in his favour and ordered Besson, his Europacorp production company and his co-writers to pay a total of 85,000 euros to Carpenter, his co-writer Nick Castle and StudioCanal, which holds the rights to "Escape from New York".

Besson appealed, with his spokesman telling AFP that the judgment was a "block on artistic freedom".

His lawyers argued that "one of France's great talents of all time" would never intentionally stoop to plagiarism, and that "Escape from New York" itself owed much to the classic western "Rio Bravo" and "Mad Max", which had been shot two years previously.

But the appeal court disagreed, increasing the damages more than five-fold to 450,000 euros.

Its judges said there was a long line of similarities between the films.

The heroes of both "got into the prison by flying in a glider/space shuttle, had to confront inmates led by a chief with a strange right arm, found hugely important briefcases and meet a former sidekick who then dies".

"And at the end (of both films the heroes) keep secret documents recovered during their mission," the judgement added.

Besson's lawyers did not return AFP's calls Friday.

Carpenter, 68, who made his name with the hugely influential "Assault on Precinct 13", is touring the US with a live show of his film music.

Besson's latest project, the $180-million sci-fi adventure "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets", got a thunderous reception when several scenes were shown at the Comic-Con festival in San Diego last week.