The “Break it Down” Blog

Let’s start at the beginning. I like Milla Jovovich. I’ve always cut her slack in the movies she chooses (Resident Evil 1, Resident Evil 2) and usually end up liking them OK. For the Resident Evil series, I actually liked the premise of the stories (and bought all the books) so I cut that movie some slack for two reasons and appreciated the attempts it made to try and stay true to the lore of the games/books, but let’s face it, these aren’t great movies.

Before we hop into Ultraviolet let’s have a quick look at Equilibrium. This is a pretty cool movie with a small budget but big dreams that was an underground hit. Bale, being one of my better liked actors, really did a great job with the part and made it his own. You can absolutely see how he made the new Batman role sing after seeing this movie. Regardless, there are moments in this movie where you sort of sigh and mentally think to yourself “god… so cheesey”. These are what I like to think of as “comic book moments”. These are the little mannerisms that are so cool in a comic book or anime, but don’t transfer for SHIT to the big screen. These moments are the one-liner moments. The moments where after a huge battle the character ends up in some crouched tiger-like stance. The moments where in order to spin around the main character has to flip 50x and swing his or her sword/gun around in every direction possible before stopping an inch from the enemies face. These are the moments where you litterally hold your stomach and go “gaaahhhh” in disgust as your stomach pumps out a nice cold serving of indigestion.

Now that we have that setup out of the way, let’s finally get onto Ultraviolet. For those of you, like me, that thought “Milla + Cool trailer + Enough action to keep me entertained == not possibly bored”, you are in for a surprise. This movie does actually suck… it sucks hard. Some might say when it was released, the Retarded Script Fairy of lore actually cheered that day. Is there anything wrong with these actors? Not really. The problem is that this script isn’t a few uncomforatable cheesey comic book moments… the ENTIRE STUPID THING is one long uncomforatable comic book moment. In an attempt to make Milla look too cool for school… infact any school, Wimmer managed to train me to cringe every time she comes on screen. There is absolutely no reason after 6 months of training for this movie Milla’s choreography needs to focus on spinning around like a crazy monkey and having her perform uncomforatable kicks that may or may not look better if Jet Li did them. No knock on Milla, but jesus, don’t go thinking 6 months is going to clean up an actor from Joe America to high-lord ninja master of the east… it’s not gonna happen. Not only that but there was absolutely no power behind her moves. Attack after attack she is chopping these glass-chested bad guys in the elbow and they just fall down… dead. Someone should inform the army of 2100 to get better elbow pads on these fuckers, because aparently that’s their weak point.

I’m sorry but if she is suppose to be super human… MAKE her super human. Make her punch people into walls. Make her chop people’s legs in half with one kick and for the love of god don’t have these guys stand still waiting for her next move when you are putting the scene together.

Anyway the whole movie was sloppy and boring. Really boring. You don’t care about the characters or what is going on and the big secret of the whole movie really leaves you with with a “who the hell cares” moment. I got the impression all the way through that this movie was a series of a lot of cool individual ideas that Wimmer had that he couldn’t pull together or glue together with a story. He thought “Ok I want a fight scene on a tower where the person dodges all the bullets” then a few months later “I want a fight scene on the side of a building” and so on. So then he hit up his drawing board and tried to put all these ideas into place to get a movie… it didn’t work at all.

If Milla had been trained from childhood in martial arts, I think the action would have pulled this movie up to a 3/5. If you actually gave a damn about the characters and he didn’t insist on either casting characters who’s entire career was based on overacting or forced his actors to overact, then it might be a 3.5/5. If then the story made some sense and wasn’t SOOO catastrophic that it’s not even relatable, I’d say a 4.5/5 or higher depending on how well executed. There is a good movie hidden in here somewhere, but this definately isn’t it.

I know some of you are going to be tempted to rent this on a “boring Sunday afternoon” or equivalent feeling day… I would encourage you not to, but you probably are going to anyway. Just keep the remote close by so you can fast forward through some of the dialog… especially the lines with the kid *gggaaaahhhh*.