brainwagon

Yesterday I took Carmen to go see the latest film in the genre of “hot chicks with weapons”: Ultraviolet starring Milla Jovovich and directed and written (as it were) by Kurt Wimmer. Ms. Jovovich has done an excellent job in previous fun movies like Resident Evil and The Fifth Element (both high on my “guilty pleasures” list) but sadly, Ultraviolet will not be joining this list: it’s mostly terrible.

And I’m not talking “could have been better” terrible. I’m talking “in the league with Club Dread or Evil Alien Conquerors” bad. The kind of bad that makes you regret even spending matinee money to go see it. The kind of bad that makes you wish you had that ninety minutes of your life back so you could do something better with it, like, as Carmen put it, a root canal.

Warning: spoilers ahead. Well, they would be spoilers except that to spoil something it needed to be fresh in the first place…

The first sign that there could be something wrong is the opening monologue: usually when a film employs this absurd plot device, it is because they can’t think of something more clever to do to get you into the plot, so they take the weakest of all possible setups: they simply tell you what’s going on. Bleh.

The voiceover of Ms. Jovovich tells us “I was born into a world you may not understand.” Indeed. By the end of the movie, you aren’t going to understand it either.

The voiceover tells us that blah blah blah, scientists, blah blah blah, genetic engineering, blah blah blah, got out of the lab, blah blah blah, infected are rounded up, blah blah, blah, infected fighting back.

Probably 1% of the entire movie dedicated to just dumping the plot on us without anything actually happening. What a waste.

A few words about the look and the effects: this is another one of an increasing number of films which does away with actual sets. Much of the film is (quite obviously) shot with green screens and with computer graphics. Some of it works pretty well, but a lot of it does not. In particular, I found the long, anti-gravity, motorcycle chase seen to be really uneven. Parts of it look more like an animatic than final footage, there were some staggeringly bad compositing, and the action (due to all the warped, oddly placed view angles) was hard to follow and track.

Some of the best effect bits are of course given away in the trailer. By the time Violet goes to attack the army of soldiers, we’ve all been tipped that she’s a hologram. What you haven’t been tipped to is the muddled action which follows. The hologram is not used to create confusion, allowing Violet to wreak havoc against a vast array of foes in true kick-ass fashion, instead, the action just halts there, and we cut away to a boring scene with Violet and Six on a rooftop, talking and… well… I won’t “spoil” it. But let’s just say “tension created, and tension wasted”.

Oh, did I mention Six? Played by Cameron Bright and looking like a young doughy Wil Weaton, this is the kid that Violet (who early in the movie threatens to exterminate the human race) decides to protect because he is “just a child”. As Bender would say, “Does Not Compute!”. Blah blah blah, the kid has antigens, blah blah blah, could wipe out the genetically engineered Hemophage Vampires.

Oh, yeah, didn’t I mention the whole “vampire thing”? Don’t worry, they don’t bother saying anything about vampires either, until about 60% of the way through the movie.

What’s truly terrible though is the final stretch to the final confrontation with Daxus, played by Nick Chinlund. Obviously, to break into Daxus’ fortress of solitude, Violet must defeat hundreds of bad guys. But by this time, the director has obviously exhausted his entire repetoire of fight choreography, and realizes that it would all be boring for us to watch Violet kill another dozen score of generic foot soldiers, so we are treated to a couple of transition scenes that show violet enter a room full of soldiers, we cut away, and then violet emerges from a room full of bodies.

Sigh.

All in all, one of the most disappointing movies of recent memory. I give it about a 3 out of 10. See it if you must, but you’ve been warned.

[tags]Movie Review, Ultraviolet[/tags]