UltraViolet movie review

Before I get on with this review, I will ask a few multiple choice questions:

1. If you wanted to protect a building, what type of weapon would you give to your security detail?
1. Automatic firearms
2. Semi-automatic firearms
3. Swords or some other hand-to-hand combat weapon


2. Supposing you’re a guard armed with a machine gun and a lone hostile intruder enters a room, how would you proceed to attack them?
1. Stand where you are, take precise aim, and fire.
2. Seek cover, take precise aim, and fire.
3. Run at the attacker, throwing off your aim and placing yourself in danger.


3. How do you light a sword on fire?
1. Douse the blade with a flammable substance and use a Zippo to ignite
2. I’m too lazy to come up with a second choice.
3. Just scrape it along the floor to shoot up some sparks, because the metal is flammable in and of itself.

If you answered C to all of these questions, chances are, you’re Kurt Wimmer, the writer and director of UltraViolet. The trailer for this movie should have featured Mr. Voice’s rumbling basso voice saying, “In a world…where people do things because they look cool and not because they make a lick of sense…” That would have summed this whole thing up quite nicely.

Kurt Wimmer’s previous film was a little-seen gem known as Equilibrium, which wasn’t good because of how it was written. Its plot was basically a rehash of every futuristic dystopian sci-fi story you’ve ever heard mixed with a healthy dose of John Woo’s The Killer. What made it stand apart were two things, 1) the stellar cast (including Christian Bale, Emily Watson, Taye Diggs, Angus McFayden, and Sean Bean) and 2) the unbelievably cool gunfights which used a technique I’d never seen before. This technique, called gun-kata, was a mix of martial arts and…well…guns ¹. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people just saw it as more or less a Matrix wannabe, and dismissed it outright. It’s too bad, since, as derivative as the story was, at least it was making the effort to be about something².

UltraViolet unfortunately doesn’t make that attempt. In fact, I’m not even sure it had a plot. There was some background material laid down in a rushed and confusing manner that I think was intended to be plot, but it was hard to tell. Apparently, Milla Jovovich plays a woman who was infected by some kind of virus that was developed by the government(?) to make people into super-soldiers. While it increased the subjects’ strength and agility, it also turned them into vampires…sort of. The virus became extremely contagious and began infecting large portions of the population, and the government tried to exterminate them all. Naturally, the “hemophages” (as they’re referred to) didn’t like this idea, so they decided to fight back.

I’m not entirely certain why the government decides that the hemophages are so dangerous. While there is one reference to the hemophages drinking blood, there is no other indication given that they ever do this. None of the hemophage characters ever feed, nor do they talk about it, so it really doesn’t seem like being a hemophage is all that bad. After all, they don’t seem to be susceptible to sunlight, plus there’s the aforementioned strength and agility augmentation. The only problem I really saw is that their canine teeth became a bit bigger, but I would imagine you’d get over that. So why should people be so concerned if they’re becoming infected? But I digress.

Violet (Jovovich) poses as a courier to infiltrate a lab where a bio-weapon has been developed that will kill all hemophages. After she is discovered, she must fight her way out of the facility. This doesn’t seem to be too difficult, as the guards there are mostly armed with electrified batons and have body armor that is made out of brittle plastic that shatters like glass. Even the guards who have guns behave as though they’re armed with melee weapons as they (as implied above) constantly run towards Violet rather than keep a safe distance and shoot at her. The whole thing culminates with an incredibly silly chase where Violet uses a device that enables her motorcycle to drive up the sides of buildings. It might have been kind of neat to watch if the special effects hadn’t been so bad. Plus, the fact that Violet’s hair and leather outfit keep changing color for no discernable reason is distracting.

Although Violet has been expressly forbidden to open the case she stole, she does so anyway. Inside, she finds a sleeping boy, portrayed by Cameron Bright (Godsend, Birth), whose career will probably end when he’s too old to play creepy kids. Her conscience gets the best of her, and rather than let her hemophage clients kill the kid, she runs off with him. (Wimmer probably felt this motivation could be explained by revealing in the prologue that she’d been pregnant before being infected. It doesn’t.) This means that both the hemophages and the government³ are after her, and the rest of the movie is a series of tiresome action sequences punctuated by people telling Violet that what she’s doing is suicide.

If the action sequences had at least been as entertaining as those in Equilibrium I might have been able to at least say the movie was okay. Unfortunately, most of them are mind-numbingly stupid. One of the most memorable is a scene where Violet is surrounded by a couple dozen armed Yakuza-esque hemophages with pistols. Her way of getting out of the situation is by ducking, weaving and occasionally hitting them so that they shoot each other. This is all captured with overly gimmicky shots where the camera will zoom in on the reflection in a person’s sunglasses and then zoom in on the reflection within the reflection and so on.

By the end, Wimmer decides to spare the audience a lot of watching Violet wade through countless henchmen and just shows the aftermath of these fights. In the meantime, though, we still get a lot of this, and it just gets more and more ridiculous. As discussed above, many of Violet’s attackers are armed with swords. I kept trying to come up with some kind of explanation as to why anyone would arm guards with swords when A) machine guns are readily available, and B) the person they are attacking has machine guns. That said, why would Violet oblige them by putting her guns away and using her own sword on them? Am I to believe that she is so honorable that she’d want to make it a more fair fight? Well, I suppose I’m trying to apply logic to something it can’t be applied to.

The final showdown between Violet and the main bad guy Draxus⁴ defies logic with such audacity that I thought for a second I’d fallen asleep and was dreaming that part of the movie⁵. Draxus reveals that he is indeed a hemophage himself, which begs the question as to why he has spent the movie wearing latex gloves, using guns that have been sterilized and sealed in plastic bags, and breathing through nasal filters that look like a couple thimbles shoved into his nostrils. Also, unlike Violet, his infection gave him the ability to see in the dark, so he cuts out all the light in the room. To address the third question in my multiple choice quiz, this is where Violet demonstrates the innate flammability of the sword she carries by scraping it on the ground and igniting the blade with the sparks it throws up. And this sword is completely on fire. Flames billow from this thing for the next minute or so with no sign of it possibly going out in the near future⁶. She uses it to chop Draxus in half lengthwise, and that’s more or less the end of the movie.

I realize that I have just written about three pages (in Microsoft Word) about this movie, and it’s far more than it deserves, but I just had to record this movie’s badness. (True, the movie itself is a far stronger document, but I imagine reading this takes far shorter than the 85 minutes it takes to watch the movie.) This is the worst movie I’ve seen this year and it’s definitely worse than anything I saw in 2005. (Yes, it’s even worse than Doom.) I can only hope that this is some sort of bizarre fluke for Kurt Wimmer, and that he can give us something as entertaining as Equilibrium as his next film. If not, then he will have used up the last ounce of good will I have for him, and I will be forced to start asking for bloody retribution.

In short, don’t watch UltraViolet.

1. It could be argued that it was just something that looked cool and was impractical in the real world, but there was a quick explanation about how it made the user more difficult to hit. It may not stand up to much scrutiny, but I could buy it for 105 minutes. Back

2. Its message that all emotions are worth having, even the negative ones, is pretty trite, I know, but we live in an age where movies don’t even seem to want to put that much thought into what they say. Besides, having a trite message didn’t keep Crash from winning any fewer Oscars. Back

3. Once again, I’m not entirely sure I’m getting that right. They actually look to be some kind of biotech corporation, but they also behave as though they govern the country. Back

4. Anyone who names their child this must dream that they’ll one day grow up to become a supervillain. Back

5. I actually came very close to falling asleep through most of the last hour of the movie, so that’s why it wasn’t that hard to believe that I had. Back

6. I imagine Wimmer imagined this would be a way to one-up the opening gunfight of Equilibrium, which was lit entirely by muzzle flares. The difference is that the former was cool; this was decidedly not. Back