Perhaps it was my being lulled into a few true quality movies from Bruce Willis such as The Sixth Sense but I was in the video store and stumbled upon another one of his movies. Call it my inability to think of what Willis starred in before The Sixth Sense but the only thing I could think of was Armageddon and the Die Hard series.
Yes, I saw The Fifth Element on the shelf and picked it up, read over the back cover, and said to myself, Self, this sounds like a fun movie. Go rent it. It’s only 99 cents, you can’t go wrong!
This movie is a mixture of Action, Comedy and Science Fiction. Those three elements are capable of making a good mix, because it was done well in half of the Star Trek films, a number of Schwarzenegger films, and even Spaceballs was funny.
The plot of this movie is simple enough. Korben Dallas (Willis) is a retired special forces major who is, of course, the only member of his elite force still alive and the world needs him. It should have been an easy enough movie, because Arnold Schwarzenegger did the same exact thing two years earlier playing Colonel John Matrix in Commando. However, instead of the bad guys being some mercenary gone bad, we now have space aliens who may or may not be the Supreme Being and the Devil vying for control of the universe.
Add a little bit of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier into the mixture and you’ve got yourself a copy of The Fifth Element.
The four elements that we normally recognize are Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. Any kid who has watched cartoons would know this from the awful Captain Planet series. However, according to the script, legend tells us that every 5000 years the Supreme Being and the Devil in their constant ongoing war will visit the earth. The Fifth Element is the Supreme Being, who must join with the other four elements whenever the threat arises. If the Supreme Being doesn’t take Its place as the Fifth Element, then the Devil can step in Its place and take over the universe.
Dallas has gone into retirement as a down-on-his-luck cab driver in the 23rd century. I had a pretty rough time buying into the fact that in the 23rd century we’d still need taxicabs to get around. In my mind, I’m saying to myself, Self, in the 23rd century, the world will be a lot more like Star Trek and you’ll have transporters and the like to take you wherever you want to go. Okay, maybe not, but you will never, ever be hailing a taxicab. His driver’s license is about to be revoked because of lousy driving, and suddenly who should fall from the heavens and through the roof of his cab but the most beautiful woman in the world, Leeloo (Milla Jovovich).
As it turns out, Leeloo is the Fifth Element – also known as the Supreme Being.
Of course she is. Everyone knows that God visits people in their cars. Didn’t you ever see Oh God! with John Denver and George Burns? It even rained in his car when God needed to prove Himself to Jerry Landers.
Don’t get me wrong. I actually like Jovovich. I think she did a stellar job in The Messenger. I even think she’s rather cute, to a point. The fact that her body is barely covered in a few stitches of gauze didn’t bother me either.
Does she qualify as the most beautiful woman in the world? Nah. Not even close. I could think of a hundred other actresses that were more suitable for the part and actually have a neighbor who would be better qualified for the title and role of Most Beautiful Woman In The World. I’m guessing that the other beautiful actresses took a look at this script and wisely passed on the opportunity.
Oh well, we all have our own tastes, and it really has a minor bearing on the film. I just needed to get that off my chest.
What’s truly awful about this movie is the depressing attempt at comedy. I mean, this was really bad. I didn’t laugh at a single joke. The old and tired lines that have been used for decades simply don’t go over well. They also seemed grossly out of place with the story. From the opening bell where the mugger, played by a very strange-looking Mathieu Kassovitz not knowing how to use his gun (how many movies was that stolen from?) to “Ba ba boom” being the first words out of the mouth of the Supreme Being that anyone can understand, the humor was anything but fresh and inventive.
Keeping on the path of unoriginal scripting is the science-fiction mixture of the film.
Like comedies, I love Science Fiction. It is probably my favorite genre of movies or television. However, The Fifth Element can’t cut the mustard in this genre either. It stole at the very beginning of the movie from the Indiana Jones series. As I said earlier, it stole some more of the plot from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. It also stole a lot of plot from the movie Total Recall and the good aliens at the beginning of the movie looked very similar to the bad robot from the first Robocop movie. I even recognized a few scenes from the old Buck Rogers in the 25th Century television show starring Gil Gerard.
Saying all that, I didn’t hate everything about this film. I thought that the computer-generated special effects were great – for the most part. I loved the chase scene through the busy 3-D traffic. The only special effects that were truly awful in this film were the scenes in space, ranging from the Supreme Being’s spaceship crashing (to steal a question from Star Trek V, What does God need with a starship?) to the stupid ball of fire that was supposed to represent the Devil (or his spaceship).
I also liked the costuming. I thought that it was rather original – and it was in fact the only original thing about the whole film. While some of it may have briefly reminded me of the bar scene in Star Wars there was more effort (and more computers to help) and realism added.
Was the movie worth my 99 cents? It did manage to kill 126 minutes of a disgustingly hot Saturday afternoon. That’s a pretty good deal in my book. However, if you’re going to bother with this disaster of a flick, I’d wait for it to show up on either your cable system or network television so you can save the buck for popcorn.
Meanwhile, if you’ve got a choice between The Fifth Element and say, a rerun of The Twilight Zone, you’ll find a lot more originality and plot in the latter.
New York cab driver Korben Dallas didn't mean to be hero. But he just picked up the kind of fare that only comes along every five thousand years.More at HotMovieSale.com
New York cab driver Korben Dallas didn t mean to be a hero. But he just picked up the kind of fare that only comes along every five thousand years - a...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.