Director: Kurt Wimmer
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Cameron Bright
Screenplay: Kurt Wimmer
Rated PG-13

Rating:

3 reels out of 5

The opening credits of "Ultraviolet" announce its comic-book aspirations right away by blending the names into comic-book covers depicting the heroine, Ultraviolet, in various poses of kicking butt. The message is clear: expect any more from this movie than cartoony action, and you will leave the theater feeling cheated. I turned down the thinking level of my brain, sat back, and was roundly entertained without ever having to use a single brain cell. "Ultraviolet" is fun.

What helps the movie is the choice by director Kurt Wimmer to shoot nearly all exterior shots on a CG background, giving the movie an other-worldly, alternate-reality quality. When Violet, played by the lithesome Milla Jovovich, is riding a motorcycle while being chased by two police helicopters, and she starts riding the motorcycle UP the SIDE of a skyscraper with the aid of some sort of gravity-bending device…well, it's hardly realistic, but it looks exciting, like "Kill Bill" crossed with Japanese anime.

The plot is painted in broad strokes before the first action scene, breaking the futuristic world into two classes: humans and "hemophages." I must have missed something in the explanation, because apparently the hemophages are vampires, complete with fangs, but they never exhibit vampire behavior. It doesn't really take away from the movie, except in the case of Garth (William Fichtner), who does his best in one scene to play "tender" while trying to speak through protruding canines. If there's a book of unintentionally-funny movie scenes, here's the latest addition.

Anyway, humans are at war with hemophages because 'phages pose a threat to human existence. Violet, a soldier of the 'phage resistance, opens the movie by stealing a weapon from the heart of a heavily-patrolled building. This develops into a spectacular chase scene that features the wall-climbing motorcycle. It's arguably the best scene in the movie, but the problem is that it's right at the beginning. Wimmer sets the bar so high with this chase/fight scene that you can sense the rest of the movie trying to measure up to it. Unfortunately, it never does, but it comes close.

Online pundits have already posted notices on the venerable Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) saying that the dialogue is wooden/tired/lame, and the plot is predictable/tired/lame, and the editing is choppy/amateurish/downright confusing. While it's true that the dialogue is nothing to write home about, I would argue that it doesn't have to be. With a movie like this that revels in action, dialogue is secondary. In fact, some scenes look and sound uncannily like they had been originally been written in another language, then translated into English. This merely heightened the sensation that I was watching a cartoon, which made it easier to accept the absurdities of the action and the plot. As for the editing…okay, I'll give them the editing, but at least in this movie, you could clearly tell what was happening in the fight scenes, unlike the fight scenes in "Aeon Flux", which for all I know were performed by Kenny Baker and Mark Hamill.

I was a big fan of Kurt Wimmer's previous film, "Equilibrium", starring Christian Bale as a futuristic butt-kicker. Wimmer's visual style seems heavily rooted in graphic novels and comic books, and when he concentrates on capturing the energy of that particular art form, his movies rock. "Ultraviolet" may not be the best-written action film ever, or even the best-acted. But I had more fun during this movie than any other movie so far this year. (Just try not to pay too much attention to the dialogue; it is pretty bad in a couple of places.)