Ultraviolet

Posted by Greg

February 28, 2008

More Like Barely Mauve

½ out of *****

They finally did it. Usually, innovative films are noted for blurring the lines between something-and-something, like how Lord of the Rings blurred the line between action and fantasy. Instead, Ultraviolet manages to hone the line between video game and film into a laser-sharp mark of where filmmaking ends and computer graphics geeks take over. This is not a movie - it’s a video game intermission, a CGI monstrosity that is badly acted, terribly written, poorly shot, boring, confusing, illogical and stupid beyond reproach. I can’t think of a movie in recent memory that I’ve hated more than this.

A dumbed-down narrative of what could have been a cool back story opens the ‘film’, something to do with a man-made disease that turns people into vampires and gives them super-human strength and fangs for some reason that’s never explained. These ‘hemophages’ are eventually hunted down and killed, all except a small group that fights for their survival.

One of these is Violet (Milla Jovovich), an apparently indestructible warrior who’s charged with breaking into the fortress of mega-powerful Daxus (Nick Chinlund), and stealing a terrible new doomsday weapon. Once she gets this weapon back to her toothy comrades, however, she discovers that there’s a hidden plan behind the theft, and not all is how it seems.

I knew I was in trouble after the first fifteen minutes, after Violet has managed to kill about - literally - 150 heavily armed soldiers clad in badass black armor that conveniently shatters like glass with a well placed kick. Hundreds lay dead and not a drop of blood is to be seen. After this follows a motorcycle chase that abandons any semblance of even the most basic physics (and is hard to follow and riddled with bad effects, to boot), and a few stabs at exposition that had me rolling my eyes so far back into my head it hurt.

Along the way, Violet is charged with protecting Six (Cameron Bright), a young boy who is tied to the events unfolding around her. By the end of the movie, people have died and come back to life with no explanation (although “I saved you!” is thrown out at least once), interesting topics are touched on but never explained (powerful underworld gangs, vampirism, futuristic technology) and we, as the viewer, are hammered by a never-ending series of action set pieces that are so repetitive in their execution and ludicrous in their believability that I very quickly stopped caring about any of it.

Most of the actors utter their lines as if they were reading the Magna Carta, trying to inject a level of urgency into them that’s just not possible. I could comment on each of the performances, but let’s just say that even talented character actor William Fichtner can’t do anything with dialogue this bad.

The thing that shocked me most was that the filmmakers seemed like they were trying to keep things from looking real, which only adds credence to my statement that this is more video game than movie. Other movies have done a similar thing - like in Rodriguez’s Sin City - but that served to create its own atmosphere and gave the film a certain agility that was fresh and unique. Here, it just looks flat and cheap. You could probably convince quite a few people that many of these actors don’t even exist in real life; I’m quite sure little else did.

I could go on and on about stupid things like iron sword blades that catch fire for no reason, fangs that look like buck-teeth and why everyone has to finish a fight in a cool ‘action pose’ with their arms in the air and looking at the ground. It’s like watching the heroic daydreams of a 14 year old boy with ADD. That being said, some of the fight scenes are well done and creatively designed, and a few ideas (like ‘dimensional weapon compression’) are unique and should be explored in future films. These two neat-o points are the only reason the movie gets half a star.

The movie’s only saving grace for DVD is the fact that the studio, in their infinite wisdom, cut 32 minutes from the product that director Kurt Wimmer delivered, turning an R into a PG. Early test reviews from February 2005 mention some interesting aspects that didn’t show up in the version that was released, but I’m inclined to believe that 32 minutes of extra crap won’t make the original crap any better.

Movie Reviews