The Fifth Element

Loud, long, and overwhelming, The Fifth Element follows futuristic cab driver Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) as he reluctantly agrees to help protect a mysterious woman (Milla Jovovich’s Leeloo) from a wide variety of nefarious forces – including a larger-than-life arms dealer named Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg (Gary Oldman). Filmmaker Luc Besson has infused The Fifth Element with an unabashedly larger-than-life sensibility that is, at the outset, quite difficult to resist, with the pervasively broad atmosphere perpetuated by the movie’s myriad of over-the-top attributes (ie everything, from the set design to the performances to the score, is almost comically broad in its execution). There inevitably reaches a point, however, at which Besson’s relentlessly excessive modus operandi becomes exhausting, and it’s clear, to an increasingly problematic degree, that very little within Besson and Robert Mark Kamen’s screenplay actually works (or is even remotely entertaining/engaging). The Fifth Element‘s oppressively uninvolving vibe grows more and more palpable as time progresses, with the movie reaching an apex of obnoxiousness in its final stretch – which, in addition to containing a seriously grating performance by Chris Tucker, has been suffused with meaningless wall-to-wall action that ultimately comes off as nothing more than noise. The end result is an unpleasantly overcranked blockbuster that’s rarely as fun as Besson has clearly intended, and it’s ultimately rather difficult to discern just why the movie has attained any kind of following in the years since its theatrical release.

** out of ****