It's time for a retro movie review!
Ok, so lets jump into the way-back machine to about 9 years ago and take a brief look at an amazing but little known film called Equilibrium. It was the brain child of Writer/director Kurt Wimmer. Equilibrium was a brilliant action film and although it never took off in theaters, it has since become a cult classic. The film had excellent pacing, solid acting (thanks in large part to the surprisingly A-list casting), fantastic action and terrific concept design. Equilibrium was a good action film and a surprising social commentary given the fact that it was an action movie.
Now lets jump back into the machine and take a look at a film just 5 years back called Ultra Violet. Odds are you never saw this movie and I'm going to encourage you to continue to not see Ultraviolet. Why you might ask? The simple answer is that Ultra Violet sucks out loud which is both sad and a little unexpected. It's sad because Wimmer has proven himself to be a decent enough writer when it comes to action movies with titles like The Recruit, The Thomas Crowne Affair, Law Abiding citizen and Salt to his credit. Granted in one of my previous reviews I panned Law Abiding Citizen for its ending, but even in spite of that I still say the writing was pretty good on the whole.
So what happened that made Ultra Violet suck so hard and what makes it such a crappy movie? Well, first off, there's no real way of knowing just what happened to get such a crappy movie released, but as for what sucked about it I have a laundry list of complaints.
The first and most noticeable thing about this movie that sucks is the dialogue. The pacing of the conversations and the actual lexical choices always end up coming across as overblown and pretentious. At one point Milla Jovovich's character refers to herself as a monolith for crap's sake! If there were a different director I might blame this on him, but since Wimmer wrote and directed this tragedy, all blame falls squarely on his shoulders. Instead of coming across as a lonely heroine struggling against impossible odds, Violet just ends up looking like a self absorbed ego maniac because her dialogue is just so bad.
The opening title runs the credits like a comic book that Ultra Violet was based on, but what's really screwy is there never was any Ultra Violet comic book! Ultra Violet would have been a much greater success if it had been released as a comic book and nothing else, because bad dialogue is much more forgivable in comic books.
Alright, so enough harping on the bad dialogue, lets get on to the bad acting! I don't know what happened here, but all the characters in this movie behaved a lot like blocks of wood, as if their sole motivation in life was to stay in the shape they were carved into by the hands of their misbegotten creator. There is nothing dynamic or even remotely interesting about any of these characters. I understand in action movies character development isn't always critical, but in this case it's just embarrassing. Not only did I find myself not caring about the characters, I actually didn't like pretty much all of them with one exception.
William Fitchner is a little bit of an oddball as an actor and he seems to be type-cast in oddball roles, but that's ok because he seems to do it pretty well. It's possible I only liked him in Ultra Violet because he had so little to say or that with such a short part it was hard to screw up. However, if I had to hand out any praise for this god awful film, it would have to be for dear William and his consistent portrayal of the murky and mysterious support character that never gets enough attention or development.
Ok, so that's enough from me, this movie just flat out sucks, never see it, EVER!
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