Luc Besson’s comic-strip future is one of the best-dressed places cinema has built, and the film sprints through it. The story is thin and Chris Tucker is an acquired taste, but the pleasure is real and mostly earned.
Luc Besson had made two small, sad films about lonely killers, Nikita (1990) and Léon (1994), and then he made this. The Fifth Element is a space adventure drawn in the flat bright colours of a French comic strip. Every five thousand years a Great Evil comes for the Earth; four stones and a fifth element can stop it; somebody has to fetch them. The film is a joy to look at and a chore to follow, and for most of its 126 minutes the looking wins.
The look belongs first to Dan Weil, who builds a New York where traffic hangs in stacked lanes hundreds of storeys deep and a cab can shake off the police by dropping fifty floors. Korben Dallas’s flat is one room in which the bed slides into the wall and the shower slides out of it. Fhloston Paradise, the resort where the stones are hidden, is a cruise liner the size of a town. Jean-Paul Gaultier dresses everyone: the cab driver in an orange rubber vest, the heroine in a few white bandages, the villain with a plastic half-dome over one temple. Thierry Arbogast and Nick Tebbet light all of it in daylight. After a decade of futures shot in rain and neon, this one is orange and sky blue, and it cheers us before anyone says a line.
Sylvie Landra cuts fast, most of all in the cab chase, which drops through a tunnel of traffic and out over the skyline without once losing the cab. Éric Serra’s score is nearly as busy as the pictures: jittery techno under the action, a twanging guitar for the villain, and a long operatic set piece in the middle of the film. A blue singer with tendrils down her back performs an aria in a hotel concert hall while, in a suite upstairs, Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) fights a room of soldiers, and the music slides from opera into drum machines and back with the fight cut to the beat. We grinned through the whole thing and were surprised at how happy it made us. It is the reason a good many people still love this film.
Bruce Willis is the reason the rest of it holds. He plays Korben, an ex-soldier driving a cab, as a man who was tired before the plot arrived, and when a shrieking broadcaster or a green alien enters the frame he looks at it the way we would. Gary Oldman’s Zorg is an arms dealer with a Southern drawl and a limp, and he is having a splendid time; the script keeps him and Korben apart for the entire film, which is a strange thing to do with your two best actors. Ian Holm fusses nicely as Cornelius, the priest who knows the prophecy. Jovovich, whose Leeloo learns English from a screen in an afternoon, is asked to be a weapon, a child and a saviour in turn, and she does the fighting with conviction. As a person she is barely written.
Then there is Ruby Rhod. Chris Tucker plays the galaxy’s favourite broadcaster in leopard print and a falsetto, and he is funny for about five minutes. He is in the film for closer to forty, and he spends most of the last act screaming in the hero’s ear during a gunfight. We started to dread his entrances, and by the final half hour we were tired, which a film this fast should never allow. The script, by Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, has the same trouble everywhere: it announces the end of the world, then cuts to a joke about a fridge. The Great Evil is a ball of fire.
Against Besson’s own films this is the loud one. Léon had one relationship and let it breathe; here the love between Korben and Leeloo is supposed to be the point of the story and gets about three scenes. Against the genre it does better. Few science fiction films of its decade look as if anyone enjoyed making them, and this one looks like a fairground.
It runs 126 minutes and carries a PG, which will surprise anyone who remembers the body count in the hotel. Watch it with the sound up and save the plot questions for afterwards. There will not be many, because the film does not leave room for them.
