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ULTRAVIOLET (2006)
Don't let the credits fool you - this isn't based on a comic book I don't think the ads mentioned this, but this is yet another movie about a war between vampires and people who don't like vampires (i.e. everybody else). I might be tired of vampires, but I'm REALLY tired of organized vampires. Were it not for the name of writer/director Kurt Wimmer (who directed the nifty under-the-radar Equilibrium) this would've been an easy wait until video, by which time I probably would've heard about the vampires. Milla Jovovich plays such a vampire, Violet, who's also a gravity-defying acrobat assassin (if ever there was a role that cast itself) who steals an anti-vampire weapon from The Man, finds out the weapon isn't what she thought it was, and spends the rest of the movie trying to protect it from both The Man and her vampire kin. Just the extent to which these vampires are vampires is left vague; they're called "hemophages" and most of them have fangs, but they don't seem to drink blood, do fine in the daylight, and something tells me a stake in the heart would be plenty enough to finish one of them off, if you could ever get one to sit still long enough to do stick them with one (looks like they're all acrobat assassins, but only Milla has the device that lets her motorcycle up walls). "You probably won't understand the world I was born into," she mentions at the beginning of the film, and she wasn't kidding. From what I gather, people infected with the vampire virus got rounded up like Polish Jews, and now that the theo-corporate powers that be have almost gotten rid of them, they want to finish the job. Violet formed, along with her vampire friends, an underground resistance with incredible, unexplained financial resources (lots of dimension-folding, gravity-rearranging, hair-and-clothes-color-changing, helicoptering, human-pinball-delivery-system technology at their disposal), and we first see them attacking a blood bank, for reasons that are speculated on but never made clear (still don't know if they need blood). It gets more complicated than that, including a speech from the villain where he goes on about how people have to be prevented from descending into total chaos, which they seem far too orderly to be in danger of doing. Milla's still great as the heartless assassin, and she looks fantastic (lots of shots where the camera slowly pans up her tight, sexy bod), but isn't very convincing with her human side. Better is Nick Chinlund (loved that guy in The Chronicles Of Riddick!) as the smug suit who orchestrates everything awful - the tone of his voice alone says it all. Much worse: Sebastien Andrieu, who's essentially to this movie what Shane Brolly was to Underworld, except he's French. I think this is one of those "every set is a bluescreen" movies, where actors are usually shown in soft focus so their juxtaposition against it-had-to-be-CGI backgrounds wouldn't be too jarring. And that's probably the movie's most consistent success; not perfect (the warehouse-like field of boxes leading up to a cruciform compound is so low-res I'm still not sure those were supposed to be boxes), but there are a lot of snazzy cityscapes, buildings, and sci-fi tech chambers. Not all the art direction decisions are good ones (the biohazard symbol is architecturally employed to terribly impractical effect), but it Looks Cool, and Ultraviolet is, if nothing else, a Looks Cool movie. The fights are plentiful and kinetic, a little more restrained and languid in editing than most of their kind (that is, a lengthy shot is about three seconds instead of one). Believable? Not for a second (the downing of a helicopter represents an apex of absurdity), but they're still, for lack of a better word, amusing - Milla's so ridiculously skilled at slaughtering anybody who dares face her (even Asians!) that the scenes don't pack much, uh, excitement. Also, while I initially didn't regard Ultraviolet's PG-13 rating as much of a disappointment or handicap, there is a hell of a lot of mayhem in this movie and it all turns out to be pretty bloodless - even the swordfight where everybody in the room is wearing white. In the end, the heroine's altruism and maternal instincts are hard to believe, the logic of the story and setting is hard to understand, and the dialogue is...gah. ("Why, why, why?" "Isn't it obvious?" No!) Eye candy can take a movie so far, but it's gotta be of awesome quality to carry the show on its own. Milla with a sword is enough to get me to see just about anything, but it's not enough to get me to see it twice. Love the vending-machine disposable paper cell phones though. "Brian," people keep asking me, "When are you going to get a cell phone?" That's when. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE U's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |