Wolff rating: FAIR
Plot summary: Taxi driver (and former SAS member) is going to save Earth from a variety of evil forces, including a billiard ball with an attitude and a bunch of guys in rubber masks.
Biased, pithy comments: Dumb! Dumb! Really dumb! You could have made a great, nuanced movie with the budget and SFX available. You could have even just made a by-the-numbers feel-good romp like ``Independence Day''. Instead, it's just dumb. The motivations of the bad guys are non-existent, the side characters (outside of Willis, who is playing the same character he plays in every action movie) are either stock or inscrutable, and the end, when Willis leaps out with a big gun and breaks a fair amount of furniture, seems like it was cut in from one of the ``Die Hard'' trilogy instead of an SF action-adventure. Even the costumes (from a famous French designer) are more 70s plastic-retro than interesting and fascinating. Yuck. An insult to SF moviegoers, even more so than other brainless, goofy epics. Also, the resolution seems more like it came out of the videogame knock-off of this film---a sort of ``Myst''-like puzzle.
Other Notes: Apparently it contains the largest indoor explosion ever filmed. Whee. I've gotten a ton of email telling me that this is in fact the coolest film ever made. Most of these people seem to be under the age of 15, so your mileage may vary. I still say ``Star Wars'' was a far better space opera and ``Die Hard'' was a better Willis movie.
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, Milla Jovovich.
Directed by: Luc Besson