Casey Chong on the best Milla Jovovich movies outside of Resident Evil…
Milla Jovovich got her start as a fashion model who has graced the covers of Cosmopolitan, Elle and Vogue, to name a few before transitioning her career into showbiz. She made her big-screen debut in Zalman King’s Two Moon Junction but it wasn’t until she hit the breakthrough in The Fifth Element and the rest, as they say, is history. Most audiences will remember her as Alice in the long-running Resident Evil film franchise but Jovovich’s career transcends from one genre to another. With her new film In the Lost Lands out now in cinemas [read our review here], below is our pick of the best Milla Jovovich movies that aren’t part the Resident Evil franchise; check them out, in alphabetical order…
A Perfect Getaway (2009)
A Perfect Getaway is a vacation-from-hell thriller where nothing is what it seems from director David Twohy, who is primarily known for his sci-fi works including the Riddick trilogy. He brings out the best in Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich’s performances, who play the newlywed couple on a honeymoon in Hawaii, only to find themselves troubled by the news of serial killers murdering a couple. Twohy maintains a deliberate pace which is slowly but surely creeping up on the audience as the story develops, complete with red herrings thrown in for good measure.
Here is where the crafty thrills and guess-who-are-the-real-killers angle. Is it the seemingly imposing Kale (Chris Hemsworth) and his girlfriend Cleo (Marley Shelton)? Or perhaps the live-wire adventurer Nick (Timothy Olyphant), who loves to tell too-good-to-be-true war stories and his girlfriend (Kiele Sanchez)? A Perfect Getaway culminates in a nifty twist midway through the movie and once the card is on the table, Twohy ramps up the suspense right down to the thrilling finale.
No Good Deed (2002)
Bob Rafelson’s final feature film before his death twenty years later is a crime thriller that features the unlikely pairing of Samuel L. Jackson and Milla Jovovich. Based on Dashiell Hammett’s 1924 short story The House on Turk Street, this is far from your usual energetic, profanity-laden Jackson but rather a subdued character of a cop with a diabetic condition who loves to play cello. The movie is mostly a chamber piece between Jackson’s Jack Friar and Jovovich’s Erin, where the latter plays the criminal leader Tyrone’s (a perfectly volatile Stellan Skarsgård) girlfriend in charge of guarding a tied-up Jack at home.
Sporting a classy blonde hairstyle while oozing the sex appeal of a manipulative, yet sympathetic femme fatale, Jovovich is given the room to showcase her acting side as she and Jackson play off each other well. No Good Deed is far from Rafelson’s best, certainly not in the levels of Five Easy Pieces and The Postman Always Rings Twice but the overall acting – Jackson, Jovovich, Skarsgård and Doug Hutchison, who plays Tyrone’s hot-tempered right-hand man Hoop – is competent enough along with the right cynical touches of a neo-noir.
The Fifth Element (1997)
(Many) people would have agreed that Luc Besson’s best directorial efforts come from the ‘90s era with his career-defining works from La Femme Nikita to Leon: The Professional and of course, the sci-fi classic The Fifth Element. Besson imagines a faraway future – the 23rd century, to be exact – with none of the drab-looking or moody visual aesthetics but more of a unique, brightly-colored world that pops to vivid life. Beyond Bruce Willis’s John McClane-like heroic turn as Korben Dallas, Chris Tucker’s gleefully over-the-top talk show host Ruby Rhod along with Gary Oldman’s scenery-chewing Zorg and Besson’s entertaining mix of sci-fi thriller, comedy and drama,
The Fifth Element also gives us Milla Jovovich in her breakthrough performance as Leeloo. With her striking fiery-orange hairstyle and childlike innocence, Jovovich’s advanced humanoid character emerges as the heart and soul of the movie. She’s far from a token female interest or a damsel-in-distress as her character plays significant importance to the movie’s overall storyline, going as far as showcasing her as a nimble fighter capable of taking down the Mangalore alien soldiers.
The Fourth Kind (2009)
This underrated sci-fi thriller, which marks the directorial debut of Olatunde Osunsanmi, eschews the usual expectation of a movie about alien abduction with none of the elaborate F/X works and creature/makeup effects. Instead, The Fourth Kind sees the director focus primarily on the internal fear and trauma of the affected victims uniquely told in a faux-documentary style and a dramatic re-enactment. Even the “documentary” approach is made to look as if Osunsanmi, who also wrote the screenplay, is lifted from the actual news to make you believe it really happened.
It works as long as you are willing to suspend your disbelief and it helps The Fourth Kind benefits from Milla Jovovich’s engaging performance as Dr. Abigail Tyler (Charlotte Milchard, in the meantime, plays the “real-life” doctor) along with solid supporting turn from Will Patton as the pragmatic Sheriff August, who has a tough time believing everything’s been going on is beyond the logical explanation. Osunsanmi’s mix-and-match experiment isn’t entirely successful with his penchant for cheap-looking digital filters tends to rob away its creepy cinematic experience. From the horror perspective, the director favors more chilling and atmospheric visuals than the typical in-your-face jump scare.
The Three Musketeers (2011)
The oft-filmed adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel The Three Musketeers is given a modern sensibility under the guise of a lavish, big-budget historical adventure. Paul W.S. Anderson’s flashy direction is on full display here with lots of slow motion and stylized action sequences including some thrilling sword fights. The movie benefits from a game cast from the charismatic Matthew Macfadyen as Athos to the scenery-chewing Christoph Waltz as the scheming Cardinal Richelieu and of course, Milla Jovovich as the deceiving Milady de Winter.
Jovovich’s Milady is a classic two-faced femme fatale character who manipulates her way to get what she wants and she’s no slouch when comes to defending herself, evidently in a scene where she takes down a group of soldiers atop the clock tower. It’s a pity that The Three Musketeers’ otherwise entertaining thrill ride didn’t do well at the box office. Otherwise, we would have gotten a sequel as teased at the end of the movie.
Ultraviolet (2006)
Ultraviolet was largely forgotten at the time of its release but somehow achieved a cult following ever since. Written and directed by Kurt Wimmer, who is no stranger to a pulpy sci-fi seen in Equilibrium four years earlier, the movie is plagued with in-your-face artificial visual background, corny dialogues, and mostly atrocious acting. And yet, it’s hard to deny that Wimmer’s highly-stylized Ultraviolet has its so-bad-it’s-good B-movie charm. His style-over-substance direction allows him to go all gonzo which requires your suspension of disbelief to embrace the movie’s silliness wholeheartedly.
The elaborate action choreography is reminiscent of a comic-book style with a mix of Hong Kong martial arts mayhem and Milla Jovovich is the centre of the attention. She shoots, slices, dices and shows off her acrobatic martial arts skills against her assailants while looking all good. Wimmer’s unabashedly male-gaze approach and his camera simply love every minute of Jovovich’s sexy swagger. It’s the kind of check-your-brain-at-the-door sci-fi action thriller and just enjoy the show.
What are your favourite Milla Jovovich movies? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Casey Chong
