Well. I’m almost speechless. Let’s just start with the verdict and work from there. Ultraviolet is the second-worst film I have ever seen. The worst was Batman & Robin. The only reason I didn’t walk out was because, let’s face it, Milla Jovovich’s rear-end displayed ten feet high in glorious digital is not something you get to see every day.
After this tragedy I am now confident that Kurt Wimmer is not a filmmaker, he is a fashion designer. The only compelling thing about this film was the costuming, which was astonishingly good. Equilibrium was alright, but certainly not the brilliant film that many college-aged viewers hail it as. But it was fairly well put together. Ultraviolet was not. The opening action sequence was so poorly animated that I kept expecting to actually be able to see wires or the green screen or something. Wimmer employed the soft-focus technique, although to a lesser degree, used in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, not so much to create a sense of nostalgia as to disguise the fact that his CG team didn’t know what the hell they were doing.
Continuity was a mess. Sets bore no obvious relation to each other and were often so outlandish that they could have appeared without shame as part of the 1960s Batman television series. Characters moved from one location to another in the course of what should have been a few seconds in the timeline of the film with enormous discrepancies even in terms of whether they were indoors or outdoors (jumping from outside in what could have been suburbia to what was obviously well underground, etc). Also, the headquarters of the Archministry (?) was for no reason at all changed from a fairly cool looking building shaped like the biohazard symbol in the beginning to a horrible parody of St. Peter’s cathedral at the end.
And the dialogue poor Milla had to say! I was embarrassed for her and the other actors. Speaking of the other actors, was is just me or did they all seem to have stepped out of Dolce & Gabbana ads? Wimmer didn’t cast actors, he cast models.
I know this is kind of a disjointed review, but it was a disjointed film. Nothing made sense! I’m all in favour of non-linear films (I’ve even made one), but only if it’s done on purpose. This was not done on purpose, and it would have be hard to find a less non-sensical plot. Mr. Wimmer, please explain to me why, despite his vampire powers, a doctor has the martial arts skills to take on a woman who kills probably several hundred people over the two days (more or less) that the movie takes place in.
Milla’s hotness aside, it’s not even worth the rental.
