Ultraviolet
2006; directed by Kurt Wimmer

Despite placing a good number of Hong Kong veterans working on the crew and having the lovely Mila Jovovich running around in tight midriff-baring outfits, Ultraviolet came out a bit too late to the whole Matrix-inspired computer-fu party, and it hasn't aged all that well in the couple of years since its' release.

The film takes place in the future, where an outbreak of a virus that turns its' victims into vampire-like beings called "hemophages" has turned the world into a police state, where medical companies now rule. An underground resistance group of hemophages has almost been pushed to its' breaking point, but gain an important "weapon" in their fight when Violet (Mila Jovovich) discovers that the package she is carrying is actually a little boy whose blood might hold the cure for hemophages, or be the key to their final extinctinction.

Ultraviolet's plot holds some promise, but the story is brought down by some heavy-handed symbolism (the medical companies are thinly veiled as Nazis) and laughable dialogue that has stuff like "It's on!" as a rallying cry. Ugh. That stuff would seem lame even in a Nickelodeon cartoon, much less a "serious" action movie. But can you really take a movie seriously when every action scene looks like it was taken from a video game? It's not with any sort of hyperbole when I say that half of the stuff presented looks like it came straight from a tech demo of Mirror's Edge.

Sure, seeing Mila running around in leather outfits dual-wielding machine guns is fun to look at -- for a while. As nice as that image is, it's nothing that can actually carry a film for ninety minutes, no matter how bored or buzzed you are. Ultraviolet is semi-decent late-night television viewing when your only other alternative is watching that creepy guy Vince pimp out Shamwow. But at most other times, most viewers will quickly become bored of the festivities -- because you can wrap up things in a pretty package, but that still doesn't hide the fact that what's inside the box just really isn't all that good.

RATING: 4