♥♥
+ Most Undeserved Hit of the Year
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| Floating star faces, floating cars and a couple of hype review citations adorn this business-primed poster for Luc Besson's The Fifth Element |
From ancient times, furtive knowledge of a fifth element has existed. About 200 years into the future in New York City, aliens attack, as a strong man falls in love with a strange girl, who is this mythic fifth element.
The Fifth Element is written by Robert Mark Kamen (Colombiana (2011)) and great French co-writer/director Luc Besson (The Last Combat/Le Dernier Battle (1983)), built on a story that Besson began as a teenager.
An enormous space opera, The Fifth Element is mildly entertaining for a while, although it can seem impossible to get past its explosive lack of brains.The plot feels immaterial and deeply uninteresting to boot. It functions solely as a thin pretext to launch the film's attack on the senses: Infernal, dumb and loud in every possible way, the film's (lack of) style consists of loaning from other eras and throw them together in typically 1990s postmodernist fashion. This makes The Fifth Element a hideously garish monstrosity visually and design-wise; a good version of something similar would be Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (1990).
The cast sees a cool Bruce Willis (Grand Champion (2002)) team up with Milla Jovovich (Zoolander 2 (2016)), who is good as the weird Leelo; lastly Chris Tucker (Rush Hour (1998)) is noteworthy as the film's most memorable character. Funny or insufferable, his loud character is obviously sculpted on gay stereotypes, but isn't gay, which is a lack of nerve on the part of the filmmakers and a disappointment.
Watching the cartoonish film, which is made with a youthful, boyish enthusiasm and a distaste for streamlining and seriousness, can feel like wacky entertainment or a futile vacuum. I have felt differently about it, watching it on three different occasions.
What is surely commendable about the film is its great special effects, many of which are made with humor, and its spaceship scenes, - in particular those in the city, - which are impressively well-made.
Related posts:
Luc Besson: Taken 2 (2012) - Neeson's in trouble in Istanbul in dull sequel (co-writer/producer)
Bandidas (2006) - Cruz, Hayek take the West in Besson's loose grip (co-writer/producer)
District 13/Banlieue 13/B-13 (2004) - Parkour action in Paris (co-writer/producer)
1997 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess
The Big Blue/Le Grand Bleu (1988) - Besson's ambitious, overlong diving drama
Cost: 90 mil. $
Box office: 264 mil. $
= Box office success (returned 2.93 times its cost)
[The Fifth Element premiered 7 May (France) and runs 126 minutes. Besson reportedly began the script, when he was 16. Mel Gibson turned down the lead, when the film was developing with a 100 mil. $ price tag, a development that ended in 1992. Willis took a pay cut to make the film happen. It was the most expensive European movie ever made at the time. 80 workers spent 5 months building the New York models needed. Shooting took place in Iceland, Mauritania and the UK, including London, from January - June 1996. Besson was unhappy that primary photography could not take place in France, where there were no studios of the required size. He also left his wife, who plays the singing diva in the film, during shooting, as he fell for Jovovich; the two later married and divorced in 1999. Gaumont spent somewhere between 1-3 mil. $ on the film's lavish Cannes Film Festival premiere, where it was the opening film, a record at the time. It opened #1 to a 17 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent another 4 weeks in the top 5, the first of which was again #1, grossing 63.8 mil. $ (24.2 % of the total gross). It was the year's highest-grossing at the French box office, selling 7.69 mil. tickets and held the record as the highest-grossing French film until The Intouchables (2011); it sold more than 3 mil. in Germany, and was the 9th highest-grossing film globally of 1997. It made 108k $ in a 2017 re-release. Roger Ebert gave it a 3/4 star review, translating to two notches higher than this one. It was nominated for one Oscar; Best Sound Editing, which it lost to Titanic. It won a BAFTA award, 3/8 César award nominations and was nominated for a European Film award, among other honors. Gary Oldman, who plays the film's villain, has later related that he starred in it as a payback for Besson financing his debut as filmmaker, mega-flop Nil by Mouth (1997), and that he "can't bear" to watch The Fifth Element. Besson returned with a commercial for Chanel No. 5 and theatrically with The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), an epic starring Jovovich. Willis returned in Mad about You (1997, TV-series), Bruno the Kid (1996-97) and theatrically in The Jackal (1997). The Fifth Element is fresh at 71 % with a 6.37/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of The Fifth Element?
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