THE FIFTH ELEMENT (57)

Directed by: Luc Besson

Starring: Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, Ian Holm, Milla Jovovich, Chris Tucker

The Pitch: In the 23rd century, bad aliens threaten humanity with extinction ; good aliens - as personified by a perfect (female) being known as the Fifth Element - are our only hope.

Theo Sez: A grand, elaborate, super-spectacular folly : when it goes wrong - as it does in its third quarter, with Chris Tucker's unfunny antics threatening to derail the whole movie - it goes disastrously, embarrassingly, super-spectacularly wrong ; when it's working, however, it comes close to managing the impossible - namely, to inject a note of childlike wonder into the stale, testosterone-fuelled world of the summer blockbuster. Despite the marketing it's not in fact an action movie, at least not in the usual sense of a film geared to an audience of teenage males - an audience that welcomes nasty, cynical humour (see CON AIR, or the sick puns that adorn Arnold Schwarzenegger movies) and which takes its aggression very, very seriously. It's better appreciated by audiences who are younger or older - who, respectively, are too innocent to get the quasi-sexual thrill in aggression, or else look back on their strutting-cock days with a mixture of affection and condescension. It's for people who can appreciate foolishness (whether through knowing too little of the world or else too much), visually dazzling - our first view of the futuristic city, monolithic skyscrapers behind a dizzying, criss-crossing sprawl of cars whizzing by on about twenty different "levels", takes the breath away - but above all a blissfully silly movie, one where the forces of Good are represented by Holm as a pernickety little priest and Jovovich as the eponymous Fifth Element, a gorgeous alien of limitless intelligence (the Perfect Woman! the Supreme Being!) who spends most of her time clad in a costume of strategically-placed bandages and babbling in broken English like a long-lost cousin of Balkie in "Perfect Strangers". The world it creates, both cartoonish and overpoweringly real, recalls DICK TRACY, compared to which - or to just about any American summer movie - this is terribly inept, building erratically, throwing away scenes and occasionally seeming about to collapse into total chaos ; but you've got to love a movie where the perfect woman isn't some aloof, goddess-like supermodel but a goofy gal with a child's easy smile and a sense of wonder about the world. The Fifth Element is naive, beautiful and a lot of fun ; so is THE FIFTH ELEMENT.