Ultraviolet (2006)

Dir: Kurt Wimmer
IMDB
On DVD

Like a film student shopping with his parent’s American Express credit card, Kurt Wimmer manages to pack in more useless effects in ninety minutes than I ever thought possible. The script is nearly incomprehensible not only in story line, but in spoken dialogue. Not since, well never, have I ever felt more pain for the actors forced to speak the dialogue that was written for them on the page.

At moments the film obviously cuts to entire animated sequences that really should have made up the entire film. Like George Lucas, I don’t know why Wimmer bothered to use any real actors. The characters were so digitally altered that he should have just animated the entire thing and called it good.

Whatever attempt to bring some sort of message to the film was lost in a sea of effects and disorienting camera. We have no sense of where we are or what we are doing. There are so many film techniques in this film it is almost as though Wimmer was working from a checklist that a freshman film school teacher had given him. I have no doubt that on his desk sits a copy of the bane of cinema Syd Field’s Screenwriting (as he wrote the screenplay as well as directed) the book that I attribute to single handedly destroying Hollywood cinema.

Typically I can bring something positive out of every film that I see. Either it touches some part of me that enjoys some guilty pleasure or I can file it into the category of simple entertainment. With Ultraviolet this is simply just not possible; I can’t enjoy the experience when a filmmaker is so clearly insulting my intelligence for ninety minutes straight.

The only positive thing to come out of this film is a 90% rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a $10 million loss at the box office. Every existing print, DVD and VHS of this film should be destroyed lest it be the only thing that survives the Armageddon providing some future archeologist the basis for judging our civilization.

Don’t believe me? Don’t Just take my word for it….

"Ultraviolet wants desperately to be a provocative, high-concept action thriller. It is apparently trying to say something about fear and terrorism, paranoia and racism. But it looks more like a shampoo commercial." -- Christie Lemire, A.P.