Euro-Trash!

Rating: 3/10 (11 December 2000)

THE FIFTH ELEMENT is the Barbarella of the 1990s: very colorful, somewhat sexy and very, very stupid sci-fi. The whole (pointless) story is simply a combination of a series of sequences or moments that have something or nothing to do with the next sequence, which propels the film (very slowly) to its predictable ending. TFE is not funny when it tries sooo hard to be funny. It's visually dazzling but amazingly derivative. I had sooo many deja-vus while watching THE FIFTH ELEMENT that I gave up trying to guess the hodge-podge of films Luc Besson was "inspired" by. And it's somewhat sexy but when the Tucker character arrives, the whole sexiness of the movie collapses.
Watching Tucker, as effeminate as he is in this film, making out with any women that comes his way was, to my surprise, repulsive. The whole thing just doesn't jibe. You'd think he would go after Willis, who wears that tight (and padded?) orange muscle shirt for a good part of the movie. Bruce Willis sleepwalks amidst the circus-like action (if Cirque du Soleil made a sci-fi film, it would look like this). Jovovich gets annoying fast and Oldman's performance is interesting in that his southern accent is dead-on BUT all of his showy acting will prove pointless when people in France, the country of director Luc Besson, will see it dubbed in French. Arf.
Besson's direction is super simple: hire tons o' extras and make them move all about in the background; have the main actors always in (very) tight close-ups after they initially appear in each shot walking straight towards the camera; and set up the scenes so everything appears like tableaux (or comic book panels). In other words, Besson simply planted the camera in only two positions throughout the film: one shot showing stuff on one side and the next shot always showing stuff facing/reacting to that stuff, back and forth, back and forth, etc.
Being critical to this film is like being mean to a puppy. The film is so goofy and frivolous that it's pointless to view it for more than what it is: a somewhat entertaining disaster (a la car accident) that perfectly sums up the term Euro-Trash!