eyeCandy: Ultraviolet (2006) 1/5

Part of my obsessive-compulsive nature is that I will almost never not watch all of a movie, no matter how bad it is. By the end of what I thought was going to be a mercifully short 88 minutes, I deeply regretted not stopping Ultraviolet much, much earlier. I don't know anything about the comic this is based upon, but the movie is terribly lacking in almost every respect.

The storyline is convoluted and almost non-sensical: a genetically engineered super-virus goes awry and infects a great number of people, turning them into "Hemophages", also called Vampires (because of their pointy teeth, need for blood, and light intolerance, but who aren't actually vampires. Go figure). Leading lady Milla Jovovich, whose lamentable acting certainly doesn't distract us from the awful script, is a superhuman Hemophage called "Ultraviolet" and is sent to intercept some bad guy's package containing something that could destroy all of her kind. It turns out to be a child who has been infected in some way and who kindles lost feelings of potential motherhood in Jovovich's character. Touching. She subsequently tries to rescue him from a great many dangers, and there is a lot of running around so Milla can single-handedly kill dozens upon dozens of opponents. In fact, everything feels more like a video game than a movie. Unfortunately, this includes the graphics to some degree, which are too often a little "chunky" looking onscreen, like some inter-mission animated sequence from a high-end video game.

The film had an interesting visual character, but this was simply not enough to combat its many other inadequacies. Director Kurt Wimmer apparently had Ultraviolet taken out of his hands and completely re-edited by the studio after they did not like his original version. If the original was better than this one then this is a good example of how a studio can destroy a film - I shudder to imagine it being worse than what was released. This is just not a good movie (and Milla Jovovich's skeletal figure even robs us guys of the normally oh-so-hot super-futuristic-heroine costume perks ).