UltraViolet
As always, spoilers. There’s your warning, although, honestly….I’m doing you a favor so you don’t have to suffer through it yourself. If you think I’m joking, I dare you to read on.
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Ok, so, as promised, here I be, back again, to review UltraViolet. I can sum it up in two simple, vulgar words: Fucking Garbage. The list of problems is near-endless. I mean, seriously, there was practically nothing good about this movie. And, yet, I found myself wanting to like it….desperately searching for something good to hold onto. But there was pretty much nothing.
Being someone who lives and dies based on plot and story, UltraViolet damn near killed me. I wasn’t expecting much in the way of story, but I at least figured I’d get a coherent narrative. Instead, I got a "story" that had more pointless subplots than action sequences. And given that the movie was basically one long, barely interrupted action sequence…well…there you go. Here’s the story…as such….
The world is a place dominated by fear of disease, speficially a disease that turns people in to Hemophages (which turns out to be a fancy name for "vampires"). The disease is so highly contagious that everyone constantly wears a surgeon’s mask over their face. We’re thrown right into the action as Violet arrives at a pickup station posing as a government sanctioned courier. She’s there to steal a super-weapon that would supposedly have the power to eradicate all Hemophages in seconds. Somehow, Violet manages to pass through ridiculous amounts of DNA testing (it’s never explained how she masks her "disease" through all this, by the way), which includes a completely pointless naked stroll down a hallway (ok, so it probably wasn’t pointless….but Milla Jovovich isn’t attractive to me at all, so I didn’t care). They don’t find Violet out until the real courier (an android, I think…they don’t really make that too clear, either) shows up, and Violet fails some sort of Q&A test. So, with stealth gone, Violet proceeds to kill everyone and make her escape anyway, weapon in hand (concealed in a briefcase type thing). During her escape, she drives her motorcycle on the sides of buildings (thanks to some handy, unexplained gravity-altering device). She also makes a helicopter explode by killing the two guys inside it with a sword. Yes, that’s right. A sword makes a helicopter blow up. Whatever. Anyway…
She goes to drop off the case to a fellow Hemophage, but decides, against orders, to see what’s in it. Astonished, she sees a human boy (yes, stuffed into a small briefcase….there’s some sort of technology that allows things to be stored in minute spaces). She hands over the case, but not the actual boy (there’s a hologram projection of him inside it….more unexplained technology that gets used over and over again). The Evil Hemophage tells her the boy is a weapon. His blood contains a virus that’ll kill all the vampires. So Violet escapes with the boy, but not before killing another twenty or so dudes with minimal effort. During all the running around and away, Violet learns that the boy actually does not contain any kind of vampire killing virus, and that he’s going to die in eight hours. We also learn that Violet is dying from some kind of condition in her blood….but we’re never told what it is or where it came from. I love unresolved subplots… Anyway…
The leader of society, Daxus (who is the leader of the medical establishment…yeah….they rule the world), wants the boy back. Turns out that Six (the boy) is a clone of Daxus and is carrying a virus that will kill all humans, not Hemophages. Daxus is so evil that he’d be willing to kill all the humans for a chance to make more money by selling the cure to afflicted survivors. At some point, Violet takes Six to a playground instead of taking on Daxus’s army of 700 soldiers, because Six would rather Violet watch him die than he have to watch her die. Instead, Six dies when his time is up, Violet cries, then Daxus shoots her dead. And then….Violet wakes up. Her friend Garth had rescued her and performed life-saving surgery, apparantly because he’s in love with her (but he never actually says so….he just weakly implies it). She’s mad, because life wasn’t worth living if Six was dead (keep in mind, she’d known Six for all of a day at this point). Then, as she’s replaying the playground scene in her mind, she jumps up and yells, "Six isn’t dead! He’s alive!" Why? Because one of her tears had fallen on Six, thus infecting him with the Hemophage virus. How this saved him….I haven’t a clue. And no one bothers to explain this. Violet attacks Daxus’s headquarters just as they’re about to start operating on Six to try and save some strains of the human killing virus. So they completely stop the operation (of course) when Violet attacks. Six still looks quite dead. Violet keeps right on destroying everything in her path with pretty much no effort, even a gaggle of fellow Hemophages, who are supposed to be just as strong as her. Uh…no. Mere seconds later, they’re all dead.
Finally (mercifully?), Violet reaches Daxus for the final showdown. He tries to burn her with a flame thrower, but she puts out the flame by slinging some blood from her cut open hand at it just before he toasts her. Some of Violet’s blood gets on Daxus’s face, therefore infecting him. To this, Daxus responds (and I quote!), "You got Hemo blood on me………Oh, it is on!" He pulls out a sword, and he and Violet pose while the camera whips around for about 45 seconds (literally), before Violet says (and I quote!), "Yeah……It is." I lost it at this point, just cracking up. That’s the worst dialogue ever spoken. Anyway…
It turns out that Daxus has been a Hemophage all along (nevermind all the rigorous DNA testing people go through for security purposes), and has hidden it from everyone during his rise to power. Then Violet’s sword gets lit on fire, as does Daxus’s, and they fight with flaming swords in the dark. Violet catches Daxus on fire with the flamethrower (now mysteriously with the pilot light lit again), then cuts him in half with her flaming sword. Six wakes up, goes to the roof of the building with Violet, they talk about…something or other……and that’s it. THE END (thank God).
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Incomprehensible, ain’t it? I had way more faith in Kurt Wimmer than this. And, like I said, I expected the plot to be utter crap, but this was terrible beyond my wildest dreams. It’s as if you’re thrown into a world, and just expected to take everything at face value, with zero explanation. One of those, "that’s just the way things are in this world," type of things. Ok, I can accept that…….to an extent. But you could at least explain to me about the anti-gravity belt….thing. You could tell me how Violet was able to mask
her DNA through all the rigorous testing. You could bother to explain why her clothes and hair change color to fit her surroundings (sometimes). But at least explain to me how the fuck Daxus could hide his Hemophage affliction from everyone at all levels of government during his whole life. And for fuck’s sake, don’t expect me to believe Violet loved Six like her own child after less than a day! That’s just unreasonable.
During the movie, I couldn’t help but thing the movie as a whole would’ve been better served by having someone like Michelle Yeoh playing Violet instead of the walking 2×4 Milla Jovovich. At least Michelle Yeoh can freaking act. Then again, considering 90% of Violet’s dialogue was nothing but Arnold-esque one-liners….I don’t think anyone could’ve saved the role. The action was what I hoped would save the movie, but I was let down massively there, too. The fight scenes were pretty much all exactly like this: Violet walks into a room with about 10-20 dudes waiting for her, she produces some sort of weapon (guns, swords, guns with blades attached to them…whatever), and kills everyone in less time than it takes to blink. And the motorcycle chase scene was totally ridiculous, as I said. I can’t help but shake my head everytime I think about that fucking helicopter exploding because she used a sword. Horrible.
I know the studio took final cut of the movie away from Kurt Wimmer (why else would it be PG-13?), but there’s no amount of Director’s Cut action that could save this turkey. It’s like Highlander 2…..no matter how the final cut came out, the movie was going to suck regardless of the director’s intentions. The only thing that can save this movie is firebombing. Awful….in every way. Avoid at all costs.
Now Playing in Dave’s Mental Jukebox: "The Beast and the Harlot" by Avenged Sevenfold (still)
Now then. Despite how bad UltraViolet was, I found myself desperately wanting to like something about it after it was over. Everything told me the movie sucked balls, and yet, part of me wanted to like it. And there was no reason to like it. This made me wonder if my Cinematic Crap-O-Meter was on the fritz. This is something I’ve been wondering about a lot lately. It first came up big after watching Fantastic Four. I knew it was a sucky movie, but I liked it for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom. So, basically, to fix this, I’m going to have to force myself to watch a lot of old favorites and classics. I gotta try to get the Crap-O-Meter back in line before I go see anything else. Then again, I’m not too keen on paying $8.25 to see something that might be good. I can just wait for it to hit movie channels, which I have tons of. Whatever. I’ve typed too much now.
Hopefully the next movie I see for the first time won’t suck so much ass.
Sayonara.