It took me close to a decade before I got around to seeing this. I wish I'd seen it in the theatres, because it's so spectacular.
The thing that surprised me the most about this film was that this was a comedy. Besson's previous work like Leon and the original La Femme Nikita weren't exactly yukfests. And in fact what initially turned me off F.E. (sight unseen) was the impression that it was a Blade Runner ripoff.
Instead, it's a fun fantasy, with Bruce Willis playing completely to type -- nothing wrong with that at all, when it works, and it works here. Milla Jovovich is hilarious, not to mention cute. And there are little set pieces that may not have added much by way of plot, but really gave us a fully-formed fantasy world (the Thai food cart, the Rastafarian ground crew, etc, not to mention a great cameo by Lee Evans who was just recently on Doctor Who).
And then, of course, there's Gary Oldman, who has more fun playing a villain than I think any actor has since Telly Savalas chewed things up as Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The scene with the cherry was hilarious, too. "It's not here..."
The only sad part about the film is that Brion James, who plays Munro (and who, as it happens, appeared in Blade Runner 15 years earlier), died a couple years after making this film, in which he actually played a good guy for once.
I think I've seen this film a dozen times since it came out on DVD, and I never tire of it (unlike, ironically, Blade Runner, which I can only watch so many times). And best of all, no one decided to spoil it by making Fifth Element 2 (I think we can thank Milla for that; in her recent Maxim interview she mentioned any such sequel would have to be made without her because she thinks the first movie was fine as it is).
Alex