(Credit: Impawards.com)
Directed by
Kurt Wimmer
Cast:
Milla Jovovich …. Violet
Cameron Bright …. Six
Nick Chinlund …. Daxus
William Fichtner …. Garth
Sebastien Andrieu …. Nerva
Ida Martin …. Young Violet
Ricardo Mamood …. Violet’s Husband
Steven Calcote …. Young Daxus
Clay Cullen …. Rebel Hemophage
Diego Swing …. Daxus Aide 1
Kurt Wimmer’s Equilibrium was one of the most surprisingly enjoyable experiences I’ve had watching a Science Fiction movie in the last ten years. Free of the excess that haunted the Matrix sequels, Equilibrium showed a director doing a lot with little budget. Since then, I’ve waited for Wimmer to make a great movie with a larger budget. After Ultraviolet, I’m still left waiting for that movie.
Ultraviolet stars Milla Jovovich as Violet, a woman who has become an outlaw after contracting a virus that turned her into a hemophage. A hemophage is a person who has incredible strength, pointy teeth and has to have an infusion of blood into their system every so often to survive. In other words, they’re vampires. About halfway through the film, that’s what they start to call themselves anyway, so it makes you wonder why they didn’t just call themselves that to begin with. At any rate, the hemophages/vampires are outlawed by the government.
Wimmer does do an OK job of establishing some of his Science Fiction concepts here. His society has its citizens fearing the hemophage virus. Images of hundreds of people in surgical masks make it easy to relate his made up virus to outbreaks such as SARS and other diseases. Much like Equilibrium, Wimmer wants to get his points across by giving you an entertaining story to go with it. Unfortunately, the film is marred by so many problems that none of his points matter.
First of all, Ultraviolet may have cost $10 million more than its predecessor, but you wouldn’t know it from how looks. Wimmer uses a filter of some sort that is supposed to make the film appear as if it’s a moving comic book, each image is kind of fuzzy as if it were a painting. What it ends up actually doing is give you is a headache. Your eyes try to focus on the image, but with each frame being so blurry, it just becomes overly distracting.
To make matters worse, the film’s look is not helped by shoddy CGI which rears its ugly head early and often. The experience of watching some of the action sequences in this film are similar to watching a visual effects documentary on a DVD, where they show a film’s scene before post production has finished. To think that film makers may have chose to have the film look like this is laughable.
Adding to the horrible experience that is Ultraviolet is its “acting”. Milla Jovovich looks ravishing here, but hearing her speak is comparable to listening to nails on a chalkboard. Also terrible is Nick Chinlund as Daxus, the government official in charge of bringing Violet to justice. He wears these ridiculous nose plugs the entire film which make sense in the context of this future, but they still look stupid. Even William Fichtner cannot escape looking dumb as he’s made to wear the fakest looking Vampire teeth ever. Each actor gets to spew out Battlefield Earth caliber dialogue (“Are you mental?”), while standing in terrible sets, punctuated by CGI that would’ve been rejected by the makers of Tron.
Some of this could have even been forgiven if the action of Ultraviolet was impressive, but instead it falls in line with the rest of the film’s mediocrity. Equilibrium brought a fresh brutality to Science Fiction that hadn’t been seen in a while. Ultraviolet’s PG-13 bloodletting is quite lame in comparison with the choreography seeming uninspired. One gun fight has Violet killing an entire rooftop full of assailants while being unarmed. By reintroducing his “Gun-Kata” from Equilibrium, Wimmer has Violet manipulate these 20 attackers into a position where they end up shooting each other. Only the scene is ludicrous because these attackers could have simply stopped shooting, stood in a straight line and killed her, ending my suffering in the process. This is just one in a series of awful action scenes.
Also failing to inspire are some of the gadgets in the film. One scene has Violet getting a “disposable phone”, where a piece of paper comes out a vending machine with a number pad. Conceptually this is interesting, but visually Milla Jovovich is a still standing there talking on a piece of paper, looking absurd. Wimmer might has well of made the device to look like a cup with a string on it. It wouldn’t have looked any more ludicrous than it does. Another gadget is a bracelet that Violet uses for a credit card. So in the future, credit cards are big, bulky bracelets? How is that convenient?
Perhaps Equilibrium was an accident. If this is truer representation of Wimmer’s work, then perhaps he should go ahead and stop right now. Considering he was the writer/director on this picture then there’s no one else to blame. Maybe the film simply wasn’t done and the buck could be passed off to Sony for releasing the film too early, but even with that there is still so much wrong with the movie that it doesn’t matter. Whoever’s to blame, Ultraviolet is an early candidate for worst film of the year.
