Ultraviolet (2/10)
posted in Movie Reviews | 
A sci-fi action movie starring Milla Jovovich and written/directed by the guy who did Equillibrium (Kurt Wimmer)? My ticket was pre-purchased. So, what did I think of the movie? What a mess. This is a bigger disaster than last year’s A Sound Of Thunder. If any of you saw that film (and based on the deserved box office gross, you didn’t), you will know what judgment I am laying down against this movie. I can BARELY justify giving this movie a 2/10 rather than a 1/10. Basically, I’m being charitable. There’s some beautiful production design in the film. The cast is quite good, but completely wasted on script that is complete crap. There are a few ideas in the film that are cool, but they are terribly executed (like the “personal artificial gravity device”, which exists in this film in sequences that could have been cool were the production capable of realizing it). On the topic of the visual effects, this is one of the biggest problems of the film. The ambition of the scenes is so insanely over the top that at the obviously low budget this film was made on, the visual effects couldn’t come ANYWHERE near what they needed to be. I can see where they were trying to get with the visual effects, and boy do I see everything they failed at - miserably. This movie looks like a video game, and not in a good way. Frankly, the visual effects in this film are done to a level that makes them the absolute worst they could be. If this were some attempt at recreating a comic book environment (which the movie would imply), the effects are being attempted to a level which is too high. Do the visual effects in Sin City look realistic? Absolutely not, nor should it. However, on the flip side, compared to almost any movie of the last decade, these are the least convincing visual effects I have seen - perhaps just SLIGHTLY better than those in A Sound Of Thunder (but this film has far more visual effects scenes - so it sticks out as bad more, because there is more to stick out). Milla Jovovich gives it her best, but there’s only so much she can do in this confused mess. I’m a fan of Milla, and I think this is the first of her films that I’ve seen that I haven’t liked. Other actors like the typically excellent William Fichtner are completely wasted. Nick Chinlund somehow manages to make one of the most cookie-cutter bad guys you’ve ever seen somehow work. But with all of that said, where this film really, truly fails is the script. If this started off as good, it surely didn’t end up that way. This film is a completely confusing mess. I honestly don’t believe much of it makes sense. A Sound Of Thunder at least made sense. Stupid sense, but it had a narrative flow. This movie has some plot threads, but how any of it ties together or gets to any point is completely beyond me. I was hoping to at least get some enjoyable eye candy from this film. Ironically, it’s the glossy, annoying visual effects that annoyed me more than most everything else in the film - and this movie is almost ENTIRELY glossy, annoying visual effects scenes. At least Milla Jovovich goes a long way toward that eye candy result. The only place this movie belongs is on late-night, second (or third) rate cable networks, or on video where you can get some of your friends together to mock the movie MST3K style. How the guy responsible for the amazing, brilliant movie Equillibrium came up with this crap is beyond me. Having said all that, it’s amazing that it’s the beginnig of March, and already in a list of only 7 films so far this year, this movie isn’t even the bottom entry on the list (thanks to the absolutely horrible Date Movie). I wonder why this film wasn’t screened for critics…
