It's easy to describe what Ultraviolet isn't. It isn't a good film. It isn't "so bad it's good" either. Director Kurt Wimmer created a film that's finest quality is a running time of only 86 minutes, and even those necessary edits were made against his wishes. Ultraviolet is a sci-fi flop that tries to replace acting and scripting with fighting and special effects. Ultimately, it is about as fun as watching someone else play through a video game with a bevy of cheat codes enabled.
To write off Ultraviolet as a good idea gone wrong would be foolish. While the concept of vampires with guns fighting ninjas sounds great (and if you punish yourself by viewing this film you will find out I'm not kidding), Wimmer's inherently flawed creation is a mishmash of movie clichés and uniformly mediocre production.
The plot, when there is one, is laughable. In Ultraviolet's future, the world is terrorized by the blood-borne illness hemophagia. Carriers of the disease become vampire-like superhumans, and the government seeks to sanitize the populace by systematically exterminating all hemophages. Violet (Milla Jovovich) steals a case from the feds, and Viceroy Daxus (Nick Chinlund) pursues her to retrieve it. The case contains a human child, Six (Cameron Bright), whose blood may prove to be the most valuable weapon in the war between hemophages and humans.
The film prioritizes fight scenes, proving to be a boring bloodbath. Violet kicks, chops, shoots and slices her way through rank after rank of gas-mask clad bodyguards, making detours to hack up some hemophages that get in her way and to reload her ridiculous arsenal.
A few individual ideas in the film have some merit. The government crackdown on hemophages could have been woven into a social commentary but receives so little time it's no more than a footnote in the exposition. Violet summons flashy guns to her fingertips with a mere flick of her wrists thanks to handy bracelets that contain an armory-on-the-go in a hidden dimension. Her use of a gravity-warping belt buckle to walk on the ceiling is equally interesting. These special effects, however, are used too briefly and leave so much to be desired that even the best concepts come off as cheesy.
Any hope of this film being carried by acting dies in the lengthy opening monologue. Most of the script is as wooden as dialogue from Keanu Reeves and as sterile as the setting of the film. Even if the actors had managed to set a better dramatic mood, it would have done little to inject life into Ultraviolet's styleless script.
As a whole, Ultraviolet is a shoddy film that fails to deliver on what little promise it has. Once the credits finally roll (a blissful thirty minutes before the uncut two-hour runtime), one realizes that the only reason the film was named Ultraviolet was that it sounded cool. Weak acting, bland scripting and unimpressive special effects make this one to forget.
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