It must be tough, being Kurt Wimmer. You make one decent sci-fi with a memorable gimmick, and suddenly everybody thinks you shit gold. Suddenly, expectations for your big followup are through the roof, and you think, "Damn, how am I ever gonna top Christian Bale still-dancing with akimbo pistols?"
Unfortunately, the answer turned out to be Ultraviolet, a movie that is matched only by Matrix:Reloaded in its over-the-top, too-much-of-everything approach to followups. Like Reloaded, Ultraviolet just doesn’t know how to quit, going well beyond the limits of common sense and crossing over into the realm of big-budget insanity. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ll already know that it’s a heavily color-balanced, soft-focused, adrenaline-paced affair, but what you probably didn’t know is that the entire 88-minute run looks and feels that way.
The plotline is your basic dystopic sci-fi, with Milla Jovovich’s character being one of the key players in a resistance movement against the megalomaniacal, nose-plug-wearing Daxus, played by Nick Chinlund. Being exceedingly cool, Violet is a vampire-esque, color-shifting fashionista with a serious chip on her shoulder and the craziest martial-arts moves since mid-90’s Jacky Chan. This is the sort of character that faces down hordes of enemies with a funky pair of shades and a snappy one-liner, and indeed, she plows through most of this movie with little else.
As you can expect, our heroine finds herself in a situation that illuminates her enigmatic personality, i.e., she is forced to protect a child that becomes an emotional surrogate for the baby she herself lost many years ago. Whatever. Most of the character development in this movie is lost in a sea of extreme close-ups, mexican standoffs and thumping trance mixes.
The sad thing is that there are a few really interesting sci-fi ideas in here, that will undoubtedly find their way into better movies in the future. Among them are an anti-gravity belt that allows our heroine (and her motorcycle) to traverse ceilings and walls in several break-neck chase scenes, dimension-warping technology that allows the concealment of an infinite assortment of weaponry (yeah ok, this one’s probably from Spider-man’s alien costume), and a disposable public telephone with a handset made of paper (I wonder what happens when it’s raining?). Interesting? Sure. Over-used? Definitely.
If you’re watching this movie as an Equilibrium fan, you’ll probably be wondering about the fight choreography, and you’ll be glad to know that there are several sequences in this movie that are, at the very least, entertaining to watch. The problem is that there are so many of them that tend to merge into one another and it becomes hard to tell one fight from the rest. My biggest beef is that the last fight, which should often be the best of the bunch, is a disappointingly clunky bit of fiery swords clashing in a dark room. Whether Wimmer did this on purpose, or if choreographer Mike Smith simply ran out of ideas, I don’t know.
If you choose to watch this movie, my advice is that you consume a generous amount of alcohol before sitting down, or better yet, brown-bag it into the theater. This just isn’t the sort of movie you want to be watching sober, trust me.