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OK, before I start watching Ultraviolet here, there's something I need to explain. I hate Milla Jovovich. Do you remember when I covered The Terminator and got off on a tangent about how the main character was on a very short list of Action Girls who I buy in that sort of role and can really respect, while most action movies with a female lead just put a hot girl in a tight leather outfit and have them kick people in the face while acting aloof because the director shares a common fetish amongst nerds for unattainable girls who could totally beat them up? Those movies, more often than not, star Milla Jovovich. It's pretty much her thing. Except I've never really seen the appeal to her look. Plus, she absolutely cannot act. Her performance is pretty much the low point in any movie she's ever been in. You know the Resident Evil movies? You know how they come off like they'd be almost halfway decent if you just edited out every scene with the main character in it? Milla Jovovich. And the more prominently featured she is, the worse the movie. Plus I've seen her in interviews. She strikes me as one of those vacuous model types who think they're actually really knowledgeable about things they're mainly familiar with only through one conversation where they weren't paying attention. She's in a lot of weird and terrible movies though, and, well, that's what I'm here for.
We start out with a bunch of comic book covers. I suppose this is to remind us that this is a movie based on an obscure comic book. Really, just about ANY movie which has any sort of sci-fi/supernatural feel to it made past 1990 or so can be pretty safely assumed to be based on a comic book. Men in Black, that thing with the bullet-curving assassins, seriously it's the default. OK, so, someone is air dropping some black spheres unto a really really unconvincing CG cityscape. It looks a LITTLE like Mirror's Edge, but only because they're lazy with texturing, not because they're going for a look. It turns out these are actually ninja eggs! As soon as they smash through a row of windows, they hatch open, ninjas kill some scientists in some of the worst choreography I have ever scene, and in weirdly bloodless fashion. Then some guys with guns pop in, kill them, and have a really sad exchange of dialog.
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Eventually, we get some narration by our main character, and hey, did I mention that Milla Jovovich's list of flaws includes the fact that she can't emote and mumbles everything? She should never narrate anything. Uh.. real quick. There's a disease that makes you a vampire. Vampires are treated EXACTLY like nazis treated the jews, right down to the arm bands even. Our main character is a vampire, but they weren't TOTALLY effected by the vampire disease, so she can go out in the day no problem. Now she's going through some really goofy screening process to to be let into this government facility. One of these tests is that she has to strut naked down a hallway in highly gratuitous fashion. This is a PG-13 movie though, so no boobs-by-paragraph-3 here, but we'd totally have yet another example of that weird trend if this were an R.
OK, now... what's he deal here? Earlier her hair was purple, and then it changed to black, and her vest turned blue, and now that she's put it back on it's yellow. Is this mood clothing and mood hair, or what? So... now she's being handed a SUITCASE OF THE FUTURE.... and oh, a fight scene just broke out, so her vest suddenly turned red. Seriously, that's just weird. OK, apparently she's impersonating the actual character who's supposed to be picking up this suitcase (which, seriously, looks incredibly stupid) and... now she's having to fight these robot guards with glass torsos. Really. I thought at first they were just unconvincingly supposed to be so super strong that when she punched them, it shattered their lucite armor plating, but no, she tripped one and it shattered on impact. That's just a terrible design. Terrible is a word that applies to a lot here by the way. You know that tone of voice I mention a lot, where it's very clear that nobody involved in the movie really wants to be here and they're just reading their lines with this willfully unenthusiastic delivery? This movie is full of that. It's also full of really bad technobabble and... OK.
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The main character has a videogame style inventory. There's some bad technobabble explanation, but everyone apparently has their own personal pocket dimension that holds all the stuff they could ever want to lug around, and if they want something it just kind of materializes into their hands. This looks extremely unconvincing. So does absolutely everything else in this movie. Everything that isn't an actor is like... late 80's looking CGI, or if you're really lucky, early 90s. Remember the movie Lawnmower Man? Yeah, that has way better CGI than this does. Plus, the actors being green-screened into it? Yeah, they're really poorly anti-aliased. Everyone has a clearly visible outline. Actually, I think we went with the increasingly rare blue screen here. Oh, and one thing in her inventory is this gravity manipulator, which has its own little minute long activation animation, which has been shown twice so far. It's like recycling transformation sequences.
Anyway, turns out the SUITCASE OF THE FUTURE contains a pocket dimension with a bad CGI baby floating around in bad CGI space who her thick French accent boss wanted because he's apparently made of vampire poison and thus must be killed. She's agin it though and decides to rescue him. Upon removing him from the case and thus played by an actual actor, he's actually like, 16 or so. So... OK, suddenly she's surrounded by triads and it's time for a new fight scene. Hey uh, movie? We have these things now called scene transitions? You should use them. It really seems like this new fight scene was just accidentally inserted into the movie middle of the previous escape scene in a major editing error. Also, fight scene is REALLY charitable. OK, there's literally like, 30 or so dudes with guns pointed at her in a circle. So she starts doing this spazzy dance, and all thirty dudes shoot the guy directly across from them. It's not like this is all simultaneous either, it takes a while. You'd figure after a while, at least ONE of these people would end up in a position where he wasn't directly in the line of fire of one of his friends, but no.
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After they all die, Poison Baby attempts to commit suicide by jumping off the roof, which I can understand, being in this movie, but is yanked down, and then they resume their escape from the building. Uh... OK, WAS that last scene accidentally edited in to the big escape scene? They're running down the stairs, they go through a doorway. Suddenly, they're on a roof full of triads. Then after they all kill themselves, they go back through that door, into the same hallway, and keep running. Uh... why did you go out there? I mean, that was just some rooftop patio with no other exits, this is the building you're headquartered in, so you had to have known there was no reason whatsoever to go out there. There was literally no reason whatsoever to walk out there other than to trigger a laughably terrible action sequence. I suspect this will be a trend.
Oh, and did I mention the weird color usage we have in this movie? It's all white/chrome structures with purple and orange lighting. Also, Poison Baby here pretends to be mute, and he really really has this "I don't want to be here! Let me go home and play videogames!" look on his face. I mean, nobody in this movie looks like they aren't regretting being in this movie (except, of course, for Violet, which, yeah, is really her name). This kid though. Seriously. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have to have a wrangler on hand to keep him from literally bolting for the door to get out of the studio between takes. I feel bad for him, and have to wonder how he was being forced to participate in this.
Oh, and we just had a fight scene where they turned the lights off so tat they didn't have to actually show anything. Theoretically, people were using night vision goggles, but that's just a flimsy excuse. Oh, and the evil corporate bad guy who made Poison Baby be made of poison just killed 3 of Frenchy's goons and they had, flat out, the STUPIDEST death acting I've ever seen. It's like something out of The Three Stooges. Bang bang bang goes the gun, and then slap slap slap, everyone slaps their own ear and opens their mouth in an expression of mock shock.
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Oh and now Violet is trying to get all sympathetic with Poison Baby by showing him how she has stuff like Wife and Mother tattooed on the inside of her fingers, but we don't get to see that, because that would require us to hire a makeup artist or something. Violet here doesn't even have plastic vampire fangs, despite this having been established as the only consistent visual clue that someone has vampire-jew-itis. Also most of them are supposed to be extra sensitive to/burned by sunlight, but surprise surprise, they don't have pale skin, and here's some of them wandering around in incredibly bright daylight with no problems.
Oh, and here's more stupid. OK, violet just threw out her phone thinking someone might be tracking her with it, and prints out a "disposable phone" from a vending machine to call someone. Which is... a paper cutout of a phone. Literally, it's a piece of paper. Anyway, after that security measure, she hands Poison Baby her "credit card" which looks suspiciously like an oven mitt, to go by some food. Because yeah, that's not traceable. This gives Frenchy a chance to kidnap the kid... the one he just wants to kill because he's made of poison, after his goons failed to kill him because they mistook some other random kid for him. Again, logic is not, at all, this movie's strong suit. Not that this movie really has a strong suit.
Oh, and now we have the reveal of the true nature of Poison Baby: "It's not a Vampire antigen, it's a HUMAN antigen!" Uh, yeah. that totally makes sense movie! Sure! I mean, you clearly don't know what the word antigen means, but even if it meant what you thought it did, you're saying the people who hate all vampires made a biological weapon specifically to kill everyone who wasn't a vampire. OK. So... then Frenchy's guards, who were just bragging about how they were just as super powered as Violet was so any one of them attacking her would be an even match all attack. And... she spins around in a circle and decapitates everyone. Or does she? Circle of dudes run at her, she spins around. Fake poorly lit heads fly into the air as everyone falls down, we cut to an overhead shot where uh... nobody is missing their head. Then Frenchy drops Poison Baby down a well, which is just kind of arbitrarily there, in this room. Violet grabs the rope though and saves him.
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Oh, and it turns out that Poison Baby is actually a clone of evil human guy. Just, you know, for the heck of it I guess. So... now it's time to drive to evil bad guy's base, where he has a semi-circle of 200 storm troopers around him. When she gets out of her car with a gun in one hand and sword in the other, he's standing there and says "Are you mental?" Word for word. This movie came out in 2006. The period of time during which you could actually get away with using that phrase lasted about a week, and that was long long before this movie came out. Anyway, it turns out it isn't really her standing there, but a hologram projected by her paper phone... which... somehow drove the car there, got out, and closed the door. OK, apparently she's remotely controlling all this from across the street and uh...
OK, again with the editing! Suddenly we're in some big grassy field, Poison Baby just died of being Poison Baby, and here's some goons in hazard suits and human baddie, and they shoot Violet. Uh... how did we get from that last scene to this scene? I'm really confused here. There was no transition at all. Hologram disappears, death and shooting. Nothing in between. What the heck? Anyway, apparently being shot point blank by goons who were already dragging off one corpse to be processed and presumably could have carted her off was somehow non-fatal, and her friend managed to patch her up later. Now she's all angsty. Suddenly, we cut to some totally random guy, whose totally random wife wanders up behind him and asks, "Has the third act begin yet?" OK, I think you meant to say began, and also, are you talking about this movie we're watching? Are you... breaking the forth wall to whine about how incoherent your own plot is movie?
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So... now Violet is going off to the bad guy's place again to save Poison Baby, despite having seen him die. Anyway, she goes in and we have a BLATANT rip-off of the lobby scene from The Matrix except instead of blatantly setting off a metal detector, we have a magical computer scanner holographically pop all the guns she has stashed in her inventory and say "Number of concealed weapons: Many." Also, instead of actually ripping off one of the most memorable fight scenes from any movie, we... cut away to bad guy being told that she's entered the building, then cut back to see that all the security guards were killed when we weren't looking.
Then she walks into the next room, where there's a bunch of white clad ninjas she has to sort of kill. Apparently her hand gets cut a little, so we see the first and probably only instance of blood we're going to see in a movie that claims to have something to do with vampires. Oh, and then her mood clothes turn from solid white to solid red. Then she walks into the next room, which appears to be a library. It has some goons in it with guns. They just kinda stand there looking at her funny, then it's like "Oh right, we're supposed to fight!" Then more goons come in and... really all they do is position themselves in a nice circle around her and then politely wait for her to shoot them so they can unconvincingly fall down. And now here's some more guards, who she's killing with swords as they politely walk up to her and wait for her to do so. Somehow, she does this by cutting through the air hoses to their face masks.... which is weird, because these are just regular dudes in a well ventilated room. It's not like we're in space or anything, why do they need special breathing hoses? Oh, and here's another wave of guards. This is like, #5? They're all training guns on her from the far end of a really really long narrow walkway, giving them plenty of time to kill her, so, I don't see how they possibly failed to do this. I mean, there's no dodging room at all. We don't get to see how though, because much like wave 1, the camera decides to look away when wave 5 and wave 6 are killed. Eventually she meets up with human bad guy, who actually says "It is on." To which Violet replies, "Yeah it is." And then they have what I guess we're going to call a sword fight.
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You know, for a movie which is nothing but an excuse for a bunch of crazy fight scenes, this movie has a rather amazing lack of fight scenes in it, and the ones it DOES have are really astoundingly pathetic. I mean, the one where all the triads shoot each other? That's the best choreographed thing in the movie. Oh, and here? It turns out human bad guy is actually a vampire. So... being able to see in total darkness due to his "full light sensitivity" he turns the lights off. So... final climactic fight scene? Yeah, we've just got a solid black screen. At some point during this, Violet sets her sword on fire, so... then we have a flaming stick being waved in front of a black field. Oh, and somehow, when not-actually-human bad guy parries it, his sword catches on fire too. So yeah, the final climactic fight scene is actually TWO flaming sticks being waved in front of a black field. Then somehow not-actually-human winds up on fire himself, and is sliced in half from head to crotch... in that a flaming black standee of him is cut in half.
So then she goes and finds Poison Baby and flees the building with him. To this, Poison Baby asks, perplexed, "I thought I was dead?" Yeah, we all did Poison Baby. Particularly when you clearly died on screen and were later shown as a frozen corpse someone was starting to cut up with a medical saw to extract all the poison you're made of. We see a flashback to how when he died, she cried on his face, and... I guess we're just going to have to assume that she has some sort of magical Jesus tears that revive the dead but they have some sort of delayed activation going on or something, because we're sure as heck not going to get an actual explanation. She says "You've just been reborn" and then some other stupid garbage nobody cares about, and then it says "End" in comic sans, and then the credits roll... and oh wow. Wow. I need to start checking special features before watching movies. "Commentary with Milla Jovovich." I could have watched this entire piece of garbage with the worthless actress it's a vehicle for explaining how awesome she thought it all was in the background. That would really just elevate the whole thing. Netflix movies have a tendency to bunch up over holidays so I have 2 other discs here to get through tonight or I'd be tempted to go through again and just laugh my head off.
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Yeah, I have to go back and get at least a little taste of this. Oh wow. She has her dogs on her lap while doing the commentary. They're barking over the movie. This also provides the surprising revelation that this ISN'T actually based on a comic book, it just wishes it was. Anyway yeah, I just needed to go a bit past the usual cutoff point because there was so much stupid going on in this movie I couldn't properly stress how bad the action scenes are. It is just profound. Half of them they don't even show, and the ones they do are so bad I almost can't believe it isn't intentional. Again though, I'm digging through the special features, and they really are proud. But, OK. Typical example? That scene at the beginning with the ninja eggs? I just watched that again, and the scientists are all falling over dead not only before the ninja are swinging their swords, but before they've even finished running over. Then we cut to another camera angle, after they've all been slashed, where we see the scientists falling over as each ninja is sheathing his sword. This is, again, typical. The best choreographed fight really is the one where all the guys run around like idiots shooting each other. I can't stress that enough.
Oh, and this commentary track is the only way anyone should ever watch this movie. It is frelling hysterical and proves every word of my opening ramble about how much of a vapid, talentless idiot Milla Jovovich is. "So like, this was like, so cool, and like, I wish like, I could like, do stuff like this like, in real life? Ooh ooh! Watch this part! WOO! I wish that part was in slow motion!" Then she gets distracted baby talking to her dogs. The horrifying part though is that it turns out she doesn't actually do her own stunts. Yeah, that's right. The vapid bimbo who doesn't look at all remarkable, can't emote, mumbles her dialog, and does nothing but terrible action movies where she's doing arbitrary flip kicks all the time has a stunt double who does all the action scenes. I'm sure this stunt double is a better actress, because, well, how could she not be, and seriously have to wonder why they don't just hire her instead.
