May 9, 1997 | Don't look now, but the first big blast of the summer movie season has already arrived. Luc Besson's The Fifth Element is a jaw-dropping, mind-blowing pop epic that gives you everything from the slam-bang sci-fi fantasy of Star Wars to the inspired slapstick lunacy of The Marx Brothers. If you imagine Dune retrofitted with an absurdist sense of humor, or Blade Runner remade as a knockabout farce -- well, even then, you won't be fully prepared for what this audaciously exciting movie has in store for you.

Eclecticism has long been a way of life for Besson, a French filmmaker whose resume includes with such chic and cheeky collages as Subway, The Professional and La Femme Nikita. In each of these earlier efforts, Besson brought a jaded European sensibility to American B-movie melodrama, combining the sleek stylishness of MTV with the dark romanticism of '40s film noir. In The Fifth Element, he ups the ante and pumps up the volume while expanding the range and variety of his source materials.

With all the giddy exuberance of a child staging war games with action figures from a dozen or so different movies, Besson gleefully mixes moods, scrambles genres and cross-pollinates gizmos and archetypes. According to the production notes, he first conceived of Fifth Element while he was 16 years old. And, indeed, much of what appears on screen has the air of a jokey, slangy, over-the-top fantasy dreamed up by a prodigiously imaginative adolescent who wants to include a little bit of everything he likes best in one big popcorn movie.

The responsibility for keeping Fifth Element grounded in something like reality falls upon the broad shoulders of Bruce Willis, and the actor rises to the challenge with admirable wit, grace and sneaky-winky cunning. After a suitably portentous prologue in 1914 Egypt, which involves an encounter with huge and clunky creatures that look like turtle-cockroach hybrids, the movie fast-forwards to a 23rd-century New York City. That's where we're introduced to Willis as Koren Dallas, a cynical loner who flies a cab for a living. (In the future according to Luc Besson, the skies are perpetually filled with rush-hour traffic.) Very much like film noir heroes of yesteryear, Dallas is a disillusioned military veteran -- a former space-fighter pilot, no less! -- who simply wants to keep a low profile and stay out of trouble. But when a beautiful stranger literally drops into his life and begs him to help her flee an army of police pursuers, hey, a man's got to do what a man's got to do.

A good thing, too, because Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) isn't just your garden-variety damsel in distress. She's a newly-regenerated extraterrestrial who has been sent by the turtle-cockroaches to save mankind from being engulfed by the forces of pure evil. Or something like that.

It's up to Dallas to get Leeloo to the right place at precisely the right time, so she can join herself with the four elements of alchemic Greek tradition -- earth, air, fire and water -- to zap a blazing spacecraft that is bearing down on our planet. To do this, Dallas needs some help, and a great deal of expository information, from Cornelius (Ian Holm), the latest in a long line of high priests who have awaited the arrival of Leeloo or someone like her.

But even with Cornelius' help -- and, for good measure, Leeloo's impressive martial-arts prowess -- Dallas has a hard time of it. For one thing, there are all those cops to avoid. And then there's Zorg (Gary Oldman), an evil zillionaire who has thrown in his lot with the powers of darkness. Oldman, who feasted upon the scenery as a corrupt narcotics cop in Besson's The Professional, goes even further into the ozone here. Affecting a broad Southern accent, a Hitler-inspired hair-do and a supercilious attitude, he plays Zorg, an amoral weapons dealer, as a manic wheeler-dealer who's too jazzed by his own lethal mischievousness to ever consider whether he's actually aiding in the destruction of his own planet. The character doesn't make a lot of sense, but a movie like this wouldn't work without somebody who behaves like that. And Oldman goes a long way toward making self-annihilating illogic seem like just another aspect of Zorg's robust egomania.

With a huge budget and hundreds of special-effects wizards at his disposal, Besson is free to indulge his every flight of fancy. He is particularly deft at re-imagining what has, by now, become a sci-fi fantasy cliché, a futuristic society that looks and sounds like the present with bigger and better toys and niftier production design. (Think of Blade Runner with touch of Brazil.) Besson's most inspired invention is a glitzy vacation resort that resembles an intergalactic version of The Love Boat, where visitors make merry and indulge themselves before attending concerts by otherworldly divas. 

Even funnier is a hilariously extended sequence that has Dallas scrambling to hide unannounced visitors from each other in the nooks and crannies of his cramped apartment. The whole thing plays like the stateroom sequence from A Night at the Opera as choreographed by George Jetson.

Throughout it all, Bruce Willis manages to find a comfortable middle ground between smirky self-parody and overwhelmed befuddlement. Although he seems to fully appreciate the ridiculousness of the situation, Willis never presses a wisecrack too hard or distances himself from the material. And while he doesn't attempt anything so dead-serious as the frantic desperation he brought to his under-rated performance in 12 Monkeys, a much darker sci-fi fable, Willis does convey enough sincerity to suggest that, even though he's enjoying the wild ride, he's not completely sure he will survive it.

Milla Jovovich, a Ukrainian-born former model with small roles in Chaplin and Dazed and Confused to her credit, has the perfect lithe physicality for her role as Leeloo. Better still, Jovovich manages to make the character something slightly more substantial than a scantily-clad male fantasy, and not only because she's able to kick butt like Bruce Lee. She effectively plays Leeloo as a wary innocent who's thrilled -- and, occasionally, frightened -- by everything she learns about the human race.

Ian Holm provides equal measures of thoughtful sagacity and comic relief as Cornelius. Chris Tucker is a bit much as Ruby Rhod, a flamboyantly androgynous showbiz personality who shrieks and hyperventilates whenever trouble starts (and sometimes when it doesn't). But even Ruby gets into the spirit of things when the vacation resort is invaded by Mangalores, shape-shifting alien mercenaries who resemble heavily-armed talking dogs with extremely bad manners. These guys would be right at home at the bar of the cantina in Star Wars. And even Han Solo might think twice about sitting next to them.