Word has it that Luc Besson wrote the story for The Fifth Element when he was about 14 or so. I'm prepared to believe this. The story is exactly the sort of fantasy that a boy in his early adolescence would come up with. It lacks maturity on almost all levels. In fact, the only thing going for the film is its impressive visuals.

The film opens in 1914 Egypt with a scene that holds promise. Archaeologists are examining an ancient tomb when an alien spacescraft arrives to retrieve an ancient artifact. It seems that this object, or rather objects, hold unimaginable power to fend off evil and the Earth is no longer a safe storage facility. War is coming.

Apparently this war is a slow process. We flash forward several hundred years to find that our galaxy is being threatened by some sort of unnamed evil. We can't fight it with weapons because any attack just makes it grow bigger. The only thing capable of saving all life in the galaxy is the ancient artifact, which is composed of four keys that represent the essential elements of life. This evil has a group of aliens working with it and they are after the first aliens and the artifact.

After a quick space battle, the first group of aliens are defeated and Earth scientists manage to recover a piece of one of the aliens. They decide to reconstruct the creature using cloning technology. What they get is Mila Jovovich as Leeloo, a beautiful alien woman who may be more than she seems. The scientists give Leeloo an outfit consisting of thin, white straps of cloth because, well, that's just what the adolescent author of the story would want a beautiful alien woman to wear. Leeloo also has super strength and speaks in an advanced form of baby-talk.

Leeloo escapes from the scientists, jumps off of a building and lands in the flying cab of Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis). Dallas is really a retired military officer. He is given character traits culled from every cardboard-cutout action hero you've ever seen, making him all the more uninteresting. Even Willis, who almost always has a strong screen presence, can't make Dallas anything more than a cliché. Just a little more work and Korben Dallas might have made an effective parody, but this film isn't original enough for that.

Proving again the story's roots in the mind of a 14-year old, Leeloo is portrayed as a strong character, but immediately turns into a helpless, wide-eyed girl whenever sharing the screen with Dallas. Dallas agrees to help Leeloo and starts out by taking her to the exact priest who knows who Leeloo is, knows what the four elements are and is aware of the threat of evil in the galaxy.

Meanwhile, a man named Zorg (Gary Oldman) has struck a deal with the evil, agreeing to find the elements (presumably because an all-powerful evil has better things to do than to personally find the very artifact that can destroy it). Zorg is a strange and absurd character who, like Dallas, is depressingly unoriginal. He's given over-the-top demonstrations of his ruthlessness that only serve to paint him as a buffoon, made all the worse by Oldman's painful overacting.

What makes The Fifth Element frustrating is that the visuals are extremely exciting. There is some really wonderful stuff to look at in this film and it's just too bad it's tied to such a wasteland of a story. The enjoyment of The Fifth Element would be greatly enhanced by simply turning off the sound, or perhaps by becoming a 15-year old boy again. This story is just simply too juvenile and too full of holes to enjoy.