I think ‘The Fifth Element’ might just be the weirdest big box office sci-fi movie I’ve ever seen. It had an all-star cast, a huge FX budget, and one of the guys who wrote it also wrote ‘The Karate Kid’ and ‘Taken,’ but I couldn’t really get invested. It felt like it actively tried to make sure I couldn’t care actually. I thought the combination of romance, comedy, sci-fi, and blockbuster action came out really hard to watch, thought I know a lot of people love this movie for the same reasons I don’t. I get it, its making fun of the tropes it utilizes more than anything else. Korben Dallas is a meathead action hero played by the guy famous for playing one of the only 80s action heroes that wasn’t really a meathead. They even gave him the McClane wifebeater and an inverse cigarette to prove the point.

Zorg is a villain obsessed with money who naturally decides to destroy all life on Earth, therefore making all his money worthless. Every time anybody picks up a box that’s supposed to have something critical in it, they decline to make sure the box actually holds what they’re looking for. The big bad guy is literally just Evil. Rudy Rhod exists. I mean just look at him.

Not to say Chris Tucker did a bad job. He worked this script like nobody’s business, but I was constantly asking myself the question: do I really want to hear this walking sex joke crack another one liner? Same goes for the rest of the stars in the cast, from Bruce Willis to Milla Jovovitch to Gary Oldman, they all did fantastic jobs in their roles, it’s just that the roles they played made me cringe harder than laugh to the point where I was just hoping the movie would be over soon.

The art direction was the same way for me. It was a weird combination of incredible execution for concepts that were supposed to be dumb. Watching these advanced aliens trundle around physically hurt.

Some of the background details were amazing pieces of art, the costume design was gorgeously ugly, and the effects were all over the top, but I couldn’t care about any of it because all this effort was surrounded by stupidity. Look at the effort put into this background for a shot that was just a few seconds long.

This is New York, but notice the lowered water level, the Statue of Liberty way up in the air on a pedestal, the bridges over city-scape chasms instead of water. So cool to look at, but what actually happens here? Silly cops chase Dallas and crash into McDonalds product placement, a noodle shop owner a la Blade Runner makes a throwaway fortune cookie joke, and the thieves are so stupid they seem to have tried Korben Dallas’ place many times over.

“Nice hat.”

There was so much effort from everyone involved, all to serve a plot that’s largely just a bad joke on purpose. I don’t understand the appeal. I felt like the climax could have been touching, but it didn’t get there due to context. When Leeloo breaks down as she sees humanity’s ugly, warlike past, and Dallas tells her he loves her in the end, I just couldn’t bring myself to care. I couldn’t forget for even a second that they’re fighting against a joke, supported by characters that simply refuse to stop cracking one liners and doing goofy stuff. The movie is constantly shouting at you that it doesn’t care, and commits to not caring as hard as anybody ever has, but then pretends like it does care every once in a while and expects you to play along. I was, unfortunately, not able to do so.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley