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Absolutely Fatuous

By Tricia Olszewski
Washington City Paper | March 10, 2006
The monotone female voice-over, the ridiculously long backstory, the way the scripters think the word “vampire” isn’t sexy enough—looks like we have another Underworld to snooze through. And when the latest girl with guns, Violet (Milla Jovovich), begins the explanation of the latest vamp—er, Death Dealer, er, hemophage flick by intoning, “I was born into a world you may not understand,” well, she sure got that right. Anyone expecting no more than another piece of inscrutable Xbox cinema might be satisfied with writer-director Kurt Wimmer’s futuristic and flashy vision, its brilliant colors and sped-up action given a surreal sheen via HD digital video. The rest of us will have to settle for knowing that Violet is one of the hemophages, who are no longer considered human because of a virus pandemic, that she’s pretty good at karate, that she can make weapons appear out of her arms, that her midriff is often exposed, that her hair changes color for no apparent reason, and that she claims to hate humans. Until, that is, she peeks into a package that about 20 people warned her not to open and finds a kid named Six (Cameron Bright). Six is the son of Daxus (Nick Chinlund), some evildoer who wears metal filters in his nostrils, and the child’s blood might be able to cure Violet. So she becomes his mommy, protecting him from people who want to kill him, including Daxus. Naturally, this involves never-ending scenes of post-Matrix moves and a whole lot of bullets. The action is also accompanied by terrible, horrible, no good, very bad acting and even worse dialogue, courtesy of the man who somehow scripted The Recruit and The Thomas Crown Affair. Lines include the predictable challenges in the form of “But you’ll never do [blank]!” responses along lines of “Watch me!” and a late-chapter, out-of-nowhere “Why won’t you let anyone in?”—Wimmer’s only attempt to give Violet a personality other than pissed-off. Both “It is on!” and “Are you mental?” escape folks’ lips, too. Ultraviolet’s 85 minutes feel like an eternity in the ultraworld, but if that makes you think there’s not a sequel suggested at the end, you’re mental.
Tags: Kurt Wimmer, Ultraviolet

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