THE MESSENGER IS A MEDIUM
THE MESSENGER Directed by Luc Besson Screenplay by Besson & Andrew Berkin With Milla Jovovich, John Malkovich
With "The Messenger", Luc Besson fulfills the promise he showed in "The Fifth Element". That one was confused and pretty bad. This one is truly awful. Begin with little 8-year-old Joan (Jan Valentine), after her umpteenth confession of the day, dancing through fields of flowers like a miniature Julie Andrews on the road to Oz, flinging her arms wide and chortling "It's wonderful!" Throw in "Koyaanisqatsi"-esque churning clouds and weird "Paul-is-dead"-ish backwards music on the soundtrack to show that the day is taking an ominous turn, and then home to find the town pillaged by the villainous English, and her sister raped and murdered (not in that order) before her eyes. Then things really get bad. Enter Milla Jovovich (the "big bada-boom" girl from husband Besson's "Fifth Element") as 19-year-old Joan. She's learned to ride a horse and wield a sword, and heard enough voices and made enough waves in her part of France to convince the sniveling Dauphin (John Malkovich) to grant her an audience, although we have no idea why except that his mother-in-law (Faye Dunaway, so refreshed with her puffy lips and taut skin that she looks like she's standing in a wind tunnel) puts him up to it. Half of France, including the part he needs for his coronation, is in the hands of the barbarian English, and he'll try anything once. If the Dauphin seems a bit genetically flawed, Joan is a full-bore nut case. She's so wild-eyed and hysterical you're afraid she'll have a stroke before the English can burn her. She finds the Dauphin in a cute game of hide-and-seek and he gives her an army. The generals take to her with surprisingly little resistance, and soon they're all hacking and hewing away at the English, and for most of the rest of the movie her face is drenched in blood. She's impervious to pain -- "How are you, Joan?" one of her officers asks during a battle. "Me? I'm fine. Why do you ask?" "There's an arrow in your leg." "Oh." If only we were so impervious to pain. By the time she's been betrayed by the Dauphin and captured by the English, visited in her cell by her Conscience in the form of a spectral Dustin Hoffman (sounding like his previous assignment was in the Bronx), been through a few trials and more betrayals, the two-hour mark is a distant memory, and you're feeling as though you're at Zozobra*, waiting with diminishing patience for the main event.
*Zozobra is an annual end-of-summer event at Fiesta in Santa Fe, NM, which involves, after endless preliminary carryings-on, the burning of a giant effigy of Old Man Gloom.
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