Ultraviolet (2006) August 16, 2006
Posted by gproject in : Recently Viewed , trackbackDirected by: Kurt Wimmer
What do you get if you cross Resident Evil, Equilibrium, and Aeon Flux? No, this isn’t a joke, or maybe it is depending on how you look at it. Ultraviolet is a messy mix of all the movies mentioned above, utilising many aspects of each - a bleak vision of the future, dictatorships, fractions of humanity at war, and Milla Jovovich.
The story is centred on Violet, a woman who has contracted a bio-engineered blood disease which was designed to create super soldiers. It infected much of humanity but gave them vampire-like qualities: strength, healing ability, and other powers - in time however, it also kills them. These people are known as Hemophages, and they are a dying breed. Humans want them completely eradicated, so it’s up to warriors like Violet (well, just Violet actually), to fight back and bring down the totalitarian regime. There, now you know.
Lots of things annoy me about this movie. I really wish people would stop saying “you’ll never get out of this room / building / rooftop alive” because she always does - why set yourself up for a fall like that? There are also plenty of moments where Violet goes up against way more people than one person could ever fight off and ends up as the last person standing. In fact, it happens so often that towards the end of the movie we just start seeing her enter a room full of guards, then we cut to another room where we hear lots of ‘slaying’ sound effects, before Violet enters unharmed through a door having killed everybody. If you can’t be bothered to shoot it, then why is it in the movie at all?
This is a film that pretty much does exactly what you expect without once stopping to add reason to the proceedings. Staying typical to the genre there are a lot of special effects, but with a surprising variance in quality. Some of the sequences (the motorcycle chase for instance) look decidedly amateurish in parts, almost as if they were rushed for time. There are some nice sections however – the comic book styled opening titles look great, as do some of the fights & the futuristic sets. But the bad outweighs the good in the end, and nothing can save a sloppy story, or an unsympathetic central character, from ruining this SFX-fest.
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