02/20/10 - The Fifth Element

The Fifth Element (1997, 126 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119116/

For some reason, I'd never seen The Fifth Element. I guess it never really looked like something I'd enjoy, but I'd chosen today as the day for me to find out for sure.

The film stars Bruce Willis as Korben Dallas, a taxi driver who gets an unexpected ride in Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) and then is tasked with saving the world. Playing his unbeknown antagonist is Gary Oldman as Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg. Helping Dallas in different aspects and for different reasons are: Father Vito Cornelius (Ian Holm) and Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker).

I really didn't know what to expect with The Fifth Element. I was quickly thrown into an incredibly over-the-top movie that sometimes took itself seriously and sometimes didn't at all. The basic plot and story is overall okay in my opinion so that's a plus. It provides a good means to move the story along and I never really felt like the two hour runtime was too long or anything. On the other hand, the film frequently just seems to be silly for silly's sake which I'm not a fan of. Particularly, there's Oldman's acting for the Zorg character. It's incredibly over-the-top and probably the most outlandish part of the entire film (yes, even more than Tucker's character of Ruby Rhod). It's hard to say this acting doesn't work for the end product or that Oldman doesn't pull it off because he unquestionably does. But it is hard to say that this choice was the best choice for the movie itself. Obviously, it works for what The Fifth Element ended up being, but was this zaniness really the best approach? I don't think so. I feel like a lot of times, the movie got by on this fluff and its quirks instead of really getting by on quality. Had it not done this, I feel the end product could have been substantially better. This all isn't to say that it was fun at times to see crazy characters like Ruby Rhod, but when I look at how everything worked together I think it was a bit much.

The above paragraph features my biggest complaint with the film. For the biggest positive, I'd say that that's easily the "good" characters themselves. The characters are all oddballs but they all balance well together to create a good cast. Once I got past my above complaints, I liked how they meshed together for the movie. Dallas is the typical Willis role, but, as always, he plays it really well and it's always fun to watch; Leeloo is supposed to be beautiful and incredibly powerful and she's exactly both; Ruby Rhod is crazy weird and doing all this just to get ratings but his character works well to balance out the cast. On the "bad" side though I do have some complaints. I mentioned how well Zorg is done above, but there's also some other alien bad guys in the film. However, the same problem plagues both: nobody here really functions well as a real bad guy. The real ominous threat is the whole end of the universe thing that Dallas and them are trying to prevent. The other threats all seem secondary and poorly done compared to this.

Overall, I gave this film a 5/10. The Fifth Element has a ton of positives and a ton of negatives. In short, the good things: the good characters and their balance, the end of the universe plot, how well the over-the-top behavior is acted. And the bad things: the bad characters are somewhat pointless, the quirks of the film are multiplied at an expense of possible quality. I'm glad I saw the film just to say that I have, but I don't know if it's something I'll check out again any time soon.