Ultra-Vomit

I see a lot of movies. Most are good, some are just okay, and some are bad. Then there's the cream of the crap. Films like 'Mortal Kombat: Annihilation', 'Batman and Robin', 'Elektra' and 'The Matrix Revolutions' transcend bad and enter into a world where all you can do is sit there dumbfounded that someone actually paid millions to bring this to life. And now there may be a new champion for one of the worst movies ever made.

'UltraViolet' stars Milla Jovovitch as Violet AKA V(apparently the creators thought it would be cute to name their ass-kicking heroine V, much like the ass-kicking anti-hero of 'V for Vendetta', opening March 17th, as if you'd forget which movie you were seeing) is a hemophage soldier, some kind of genetic vampiric freak who along with her brethren are trying to stop the medical elite from destroying their people. The movie stars mostly nobodies who prove that anyone can get a movie role, especially if you have an accent. There are some tolerable action sequences and some of the visuals are alright, especially Milla. She's at her airbrushed best here, and to be fair to her, she does a good job with the role given to her. It isn't Milla who brings this film down, and for that I feel bad for her.

'UltraViolet' is shockingly bad. You may wonder what is so shockingly bad about a film where Milla runs around in shockingly tight pants trying to save a shockingly boring world from apparent shocking destruction, and the answer is everything. The pedantic script, the hackneyed acting, the bleh special effects, the cookie-cutter direction, the lame music that never freaking stops through the whole film...but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let us look closer at 'UltraViolet' in an essay entitled, "Why UltraViolet's Creators Hate You."

Clearly the films' Writer/Director, Kurt Wimmer, is 10 years old. This is the only explanation for the film's look and script. Often I have been sitting at work...okay, for this example, let's use school...grade school...and thought, "Man, it'd be so wicked if I could ride a motorbike along a building! Ooooh, and hit some guy so hard his armour like, shatters all over the place! OH! And then the motorbike could like, fly into a helicopter and totally kill the guys in it and drive out before it explodes! That'd be so cool." Unfortunately for audiences, someone took those ideas and made a movie around them. I only wish I had been able to do it first, because at least my movie would have had dinosaurs in it. 'UltraViolet' is a film filled with potentially cool ideas with nothing tangible to hold them together. Ideas are just ideas until you place context behind them. The result is so incoherent and dysfunctional it reminded me of when I would have my Transformer toys fight my X-Men toys. Then of course the main characters open their mouths to emote and attempt to progress the story, and any hope there were good ideas in this story fly out the window. The dialogue is laughable but given the type of film this is, I was hardly surprised. Fortunately there is little dialogue, but I fear what was left out might have made the story slightly more palpable.

As bad as the story is, the direction just might be worse. This movie is a breezy 87 minutes long but holy crap did it seem longer. Between forced exposition scenes and blurry combat, the director seems to favor close ups on the hero, then close ups on the enemy, then another close up of the hero, followed by another close up of the enemy. This goes on for awhile before the lame fighting begins. If you want a good example of this technique, see Kill Bill. Here it exists to extend scenes and force drama, neither of which should be bothered with. The action scenes are the most disappointing. With strong ties to the Hong Kong film community, you might think the action would be above par. Unfortunately we get poor choreography and perhaps the worst offense, little to no blood! For a film with a title so close to ultra-violence, you would think there would be some here. Of course we also get the pre-requisite open-ending, should a sequel be necessary. My online petition to prevent this starts now.

There is absolutely no redeeming quality to this movie. Even the music is relentless and pedestrian. Perhaps one might wonder why my opinion is so vile when it comes to 'UltraViolet'. The answer is simple; this film is the reason sci-fi/fantasy/comic book films are never taken seriously. Some writing class dropout makes an odd independent movie and all of a sudden he has Hollywood clout to make "His great vision" of a genre film. I do not know what art-house crap factory spawned Kurt Wimmer, but this "filmmaker" has about as much creative talent as 'Underworld' franchise master Len Wiseman has in his pinky finger, and for those who have seen 'Underworld' and its sequel, you know this is no compliment. Any and all potential writers and directors can look to this tripe film as an example that any loser with a powerbook and a DV cam, no matter how talentless they are, can make it in Hollywood. So feel bad for Milla. As bad as her 'Resident Evil' films are, they're Shakespeare compared to this excrement. An absolutely awful film experience.