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The Fifth Element (1997) More at IMDbPro »

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Slammin', Glammin' and Hammin'., 12 July 2006

Author: dunmore_ego from Los Angeles, California

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

*The Fifth Element* has spawned so many negative reviews (even whilst admitting to enjoying it) that I get the feeling critics are jealous that Euros can pull off an action blockbuster with as much brainless flair as Americans – with twice the guilty pleasure.

In a future society realized in eye-fatiguing detail by writer/director Luc Besson, a race of aliens who are half Guardians of the Universe and half turtle, entrust a secret to generations of humans – four carved stones representing the four elements of Water, Fire, Earth and Air, which, when combined with a mysterious Fifth Element, will keep Ultimate Evil at bay. This Ultimate Evil apparently threatens the Earth every 500 years, the most recent attack being in 1987 when Jethro Tull won the Grammy for Best Heavy Metal Album.

Never mind that of the 116 confirmed elements, the fifth element is boron (its atomic number being 5, denoting it has 5 protons in the atom's nucleus – sorry, I forgot the majority of people still believe in angels and astrology and in superstitions dating from 500 BC which identified only four elements that constitute the cosmos – didn't mean to bring SCIENCE into a fiction based on science…), in a world where supermodel Milla Jovovich fights evil whilst being 96-percent naked, I'll run with her being the Fifth Element.

It's up to THE SLAMMIN' Bruce Willis, playing Korben Dallas playing Bruce Willis, an ex-army, devil-may-care flying-cab driver, to keep nekkid alien Leeloo (Jovovich) out of danger and out of clothes. Hitching a ride to Planet Phloston – for seemingly no reason other than to flex Digital Domain's special effects muscles - he must battle aliens that look like bulldogs, put his hand into the innards of a singer who looks like a vacuum cleaner and try to avoid - THE GLAMMIN' Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker), an interstellar DJ who looks like a transsexual Chris Rock.

Then there's THE HAMMIN' Gary Oldman: he's done a junkie Pistol, he's done a gay playwright, he's done a deaf Austrian composer, he's done a blood-drinking undead version of Brad Pitt; here, he is Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, an interstellar black market arms dealer with a Bible Belt drawl – is there anything this actor can't do? To bring about the end of existence as we know it, The Ultimate Evil must work through Zorg's company, for which Zorg charges the usual agent's fee of 10-percent. 10-percent of the end-of-existence-as-we-know-it works out to about Canada.

Even though the mysticism of a prophecy engines this movie's plot, Besson has unabashedly crafted a popcorn-and-bullets action-adventure comedy and obviously regards it as such, never for an instant threatening to tread philosophical, scientific or preachy ground; paradoxes, non-science, plot holes and cheap neoperene monster makeup flying hither and thither.

There's something for all three sexes here: Korben Dallas for the ladies, Leeloo for the guys and Ruby Rhod for the girly-men.

(Movie Maniacs, visit: poffysmoviemania.com)

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