'Ultraviolet'

Comments (0) By Rob Nelson Tuesday, Feb 28 2006

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Ultraviolet
Written and directed by Kurt Wimmer
Screen Gems, in release

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Seems this is yet another puddle of futuristic sludge for us to blame on John Cassavetes, whose Gloria (1980) reportedly inspired writer-director Kurt Wimmer (Equilibrium) to replace Gena Rowlands with Milla Jovovich and the original heroine's ordinary pistol with a Tec-9/knife combo that looks like an industrial-strength stapler. Another striking modification: Wimmer's late-21st-century Gloria is, in her words, "something less than human"—a diseased vampire, in fact, who carries a real boy in her nth-generation iBook even though there's a Blood War being waged between humans and her kind in what's left of Shanghai. Because the movie's smeared pastel images strongly suggest an untweaked blowup from the Xbox, it's never clear whether the rail-thin Jovovich actually performed in the film or just consented to full-body digitization. And though terms such as "dimension-compressing" and "vampiral antigens" are ostensibly meant to clarify things, the most receptive audience will mainly be enlightened to know that you can make a movie as thoroughly unprofessional as this one and still get it released in 3,000 theaters.