The Fifth Element

National Review, June 16, 1997 by John Simon

Luc Besson's The Fifth Element cost a hundred million bucks, three-quarters footed by Gaumont, the rest by Sony, making it Europe's most expensive film. It is a cinematic comic strip about the twenty-third century, when a dread prophecy from 1914 by unsightly but benevolent extraterrestrials comes true. They warned that the four classical elements must combine with the fifth, love, to defeat evil invaders who look like two-footed pig-dogs, heavily armed, but shooting remarkably poorly. There is also a villainous earthling, Zorg, played ludicrously by Gary Oldman, and an extramundane, genetically engineered redeemer, Leeloo, who arrives on Earth naked but is promptly bedizened in a few suggestive white bandages (bondage?), and who has orange hair with blond roots --punk chic.

Everyone chases after a box containing four stones that, for some reason, are the four elements. Earth's champion is Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis), a New York cabbie in whose flying taxi Leeloo happens to alight. The two are to retrieve the box at a surreal resort hotel where a freakish female singer . . . but why bother? The script (by Besson and Robert Mark Kamen) makes no more sense than the motley cast of mostly weirdos and creeps. However, this is not about sense, but about a) futuristic gizmos, b) computer effects, c) outlandish costumes by the high priest of outlandishness, Jean-Paul Gaultier, and d) Bruce Willis and the model Milla Jovovich (Leeloo) carrying on. Chastely, though, so as not to exclude the kiddies, at whom this staggering expenditure is chiefly and stultifyingly aimed.