The Fifth Element (1997)

DIRECTOR: Luc Besson

CAST: Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, Milla Jovovich, Ian Holm, Chris Tucker, Brion James, Luke Perry, Tommy Lister

REVIEW:

It’s unsurprising that Luc Besson wrote The Fifth Element when he was a teenager, even if it took him decades to bring it to the screen.  Put simply, The Fifth Element is a hot mess of a movie, a scatterbrained, scattershot hodgepodge of colorful scenes thrown slapdash into the mix, with a borderline incoherent plot to string it all together, served up with $100 million worth of visual razzle dazzle, relying on a sensory overload to compensate for a muddled narrative.  The result still has its entertainment quota, and is a colorful, lively, and vibrant enough ride that it’s at least not boring, but it helps to shut your brain off in the interim.

Insofar as there’s a cohesive plot, it goes something like this.  Centuries into the future, a malevolent entity that looks like an asteroid (and that’s about all the explanation you’re going to get, besides Ian Holm imparting some would-be profundities about “absolute evil”) is hurtling toward Earth (but we’re conveniently given an arbitrary window of forty-eight hours) to wipe out all life, because….well, because it’s evil, I guess.  Luckily, mankind has a secret weapon, a “fifth element”, a supreme being and lone warrior against evil, who is delivered by some helpful aliens who waddle around in metal bodysuits and have been safeguarding it for three hundred years (you’ll never know anything more about them either).  To everyone’s surprise, though, this supreme being turns out to be a girl, Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), who has a lot to say but none of it in a language anyone can understand, and takes a dive out a window into the back of the cab driven by down-on-his-luck ex-military cabbie Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis), who becomes infatuated with the strange young woman and grudgingly decides to help, joining forces (sort of) with frazzled priest Vito Cornelius (Ian Holm).  But there’s more problems.  Leeloo needs four ancient stones representing the elements to manifest her evil-vanquishing power, and the stones are also being sought by a gang of alien warriors in cahoots with business mogul Mr. Zorg (Gary Oldman).

If you have questions about aspects of the above, rest assured The Fifth Element is not interested in answering them.  What is this “absolute evil”?  What exactly is Leeloo?  Why is Mr. Zorg, who lives on Earth, apparently helping the evil asteroid barreling toward it to destroy it?  Who knows.  The Fifth Element hurls a sensory overload at you so fast, furious, and relentless that it hopes you won’t spend too much time thinking about how thin and borderline incoherent the storyline is.  To this end, it sometimes succeeds, at least momentarily.  The shots of the busy airborne crisscrossing traffic lanes of futuristic New York City may bring fleeting thoughts of Blade Runner to mind (though the two film’s tones could not be further apart).  Eric Serra provides a busy, throbbing, pop-infused soundtrack to pump up the action.  There’s various striking images, like future NYC, an alien opera singer with blue skin and long tendrils hanging from her head like dreadlocks, an opulent space cruise liner, and Milla Jovovich’s fiery orange hair.  But the movie is too much of a messy hodgepodge to comfortably coalesce.  The tone flickers between would-be sci-fi epic, action flick, and action-comedy, with awkward comedic skits of varying effectiveness that go on too long, especially those involving Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker), a wildly flamboyant disc jockey (I guess?) whose fashion sense and hairstyle is, shall we say, eccentric.  The movie never settles into a consistent tone or seems cohesively put together, and the hero and villain never even interact with each other.  In fact, as delightfully wacky as Gary Oldman’s off-the-wall Mr. Zorg is, he barely needs to be in the movie.

All the over-the-top razzle dazzle leaves the actors floundering to hold their own.  Bruce Willis plays Korben Dallas like a slight variation of John McClane.  Milla Jovovich (who was romantically involved with her director Besson), sporting flaming hair, skimpy outfits, and feral mannerisms, makes an impression, though it’s hard to say how much of it really has to do with acting (she speaks only a few words of English, although she enthusiastically chatters away in a made-up alien language).  As the token “respected thespian”, Ian Holm is stuck whiplashing between exposition, gravely intoning nuggets of wisdom like “evil begets evil”, and slapsticky comedy.  Only two cast members really manage to stick out, though not quite for the same reasons.  Chris Tucker, obviously given free rein by the filmmakers, goes way over-the-top as the obnoxious Ruby Rhod, who’s permanently dialed up to eleven, but his outrageousness starts to wear thin real quick.  Some scenes, especially his introduction, are begging to be cut down (the whole movie could have used a more disciplined editor and/or a less self-indulgent director), but the filmmakers are seemingly content to let him prance around doing whatever he wants.  Meanwhile, Gary Oldman reunites with Besson from 1994’s The Professional, and manages to be even more off-the-wall here as the bizarre Mr. Zorg, who sports what looks like a Hitler hairstyle if his mustache fell down to his chin and drawls in a choked Texan (?) accent.  Does Oldman’s performance service the movie or distract from it?  I don’t know, but it’s so oddball that one can’t help but pay attention to it, even if his wackiness doesn’t ultimately have a lot to do with anything else that’s going on.

At least Besson embraces the inherent campiness of the material rather than expecting this to be taken in deadly earnest, but The Fifth Element crosses the line into goofy, ridiculous flamboyance that makes it impossible to take seriously.  Then again, given how incoherent the plot is anyway, maybe that’s not a bad thing.  In any case, insofar as there’s a triumph here, it’s firmly of style over substance.  There’s enough of the former that at least The Fifth Element isn’t boring, but it is a bit “sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

* * 1/2