The Fifth Element

Luc Besson is essentially an event producer with a penchant for meretricious display. Put him at the helm of a sci-fi film, a genre which is notoriously prone to flights of fancy and self-parody and moreover, give him a sizeable budget, and you have the ingredients for egregious excess. With Jean-Paul Gaultier as costume designer and Besson-regular Eric Serra providing the music, The Fifth Element is also painfully boring and an embarrassment for anyone who holds Gary Oldman and Ian Holm in esteem.

Bruce Willis plays an ex-military hard man who, with Holm's fuddy-duddy hierophant, is in a race to save the world as we know it by getting a space creature (Milla Jovovich) and four special stones to a pyramid in Egypt where they can be aligned and so defeat Evil (as Evil's agent on Earth, Oldman reprises his sociopath role from Besson's marvellous 1994 film, Leon The Professional. 

Lifting liberally from classics of the genre such as Blade Runner (1992), Brazil (1985) and the Star Wars films, Besson treats the whole thing as an amusing romp, around the mid-way mark moving pretty much to the completely comedic, even throwing Lee Evans into the mix. Willis is serviceable as the action man but Jovovich is a bland presence as the plot goes through the usual motions.  The best one can say about The Fifth Element is that there is enough going on visually (it won an Oscar for special effects) to distract one from the terminal stasis induced by Besson's witless posturings but that hardly makes for much of a reason to watch this.

 

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