Film review by Kevin Patterson
The Fifth Element (PG-13, 1997) Directed by Luc Besson. Written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. Starring Bruce Willis, Milla Jovovich, Gary Oldman.
After the hype for The Fifth Element, I went expecting to see a science fiction movie with a sophisticated story along the lines of, say, Blade Runner or 2001: A Space Odyssey. That story may have been there, but the movie didn't quite seem to deliver all of it. What it did deliver, however, was a movie that took the conventions of sci-fi/action cinema to their logical extremes, creating an entertaining atmosphere of non-stop mania.
This actually worked very well for two reasons. First, the art direction was excellent. The cartoonish, Terry Gilliam-esque visuals gave off the impression that the film wasn't taking itself too seriously and that perhaps we were supposed to believe that none of this was even real and instead was taking place inside someone's deranged mind (such as, perhaps, that of writer/director Luc Besson). Another review that described The Fifth Element as something like a "lunatic's dream" pretty much hit the nail on the head.
Second, this sense of an interstellar roller-coaster was achieved not just through lots of fights, chases, and explosions (though there were certainly plenty of those), but also through some hilariously manic characters. First and foremost was Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an alien woman who possesses the key to stopping an evil force poised to destroy the earth; as the reincarnation of a Supreme Being, she speaks only the "ancient tongue." As a result, she spends most of her time hysterically spouting gibberish (which she does quite convincingly) and single-handedly beating the tar out of hordes of alien mercenaries (hey, she's a Supreme Being, remember?). Also notable were Chris Tucker as a talk-show host and Gary Oldman as a greedy warlord, both of whose characters give new meaning to the word "flamboyant." Bruce Willis, the hero of the story, strolls through all this in typically deadpan fashion, delivering the usual wisecracks, blowing bad guys' heads off, and generally kicking ass as needed.
Another benefit to this approach is that it gives what is basically a ludicrous story an odd kind of inner coherence. When watching the movie Speed, for example, I couldn't help but think that there wasn't really anything all that special about the characters played by Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock and that in reality they would have quickly lost control of the situation. With The Fifth Element, on the other hand, you get the feeling that if these characters somehow actually existed (perhaps as a sort of practical joke on the rest of us by one of Leeloo's Supreme Being cousins), they just might be able to pull this off.
Unfortunately, the story itself sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. The bare-bones plot is fairly standard sci-fi: an evil force appears and seems ready to destroy life on Earth, and some ancient artifacts as well as Leeloo's supernatural powers are needed to defeat it. There were a few hints, however, that there was really more to it than that, and that perhaps not everything in Luc Besson's head quite made it to the screen. Similarly, the "moral lesson" at the end of the movie, in which Leeloo becomes reluctant to save the human race when she learns of its bloody history, seems kind of forced and obligatory because not much time is devoted to it. The Fifth Element is not, then, the landmark sci-fi classic that some had predicted, but it is a well-executed, generally clever, and wonderfully entertaining action-comedy that is, if nothing else, worth the price of admission.
Grade: A-
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