Ultraviolet 2006 is my guilty pleasure movie

  Blender Dumbass
September 21, 2025

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#Ultraviolet #MillaJovovich #KurtWimmer #film #review #movies #cinemastodon

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With 9% Rotten Tomatoes score 2006 Kurt Wimmer film Ultraviolet starring Milla Jovovich cannot possibly be any good, can it? Well I re-watched it for this review and while I somewhat see where the critics are coming from, I also have enjoyed the hell out of it.

The film tries to have a scope of something like Michael Bay's The Island, but with only a quarter of a budget. The Island looks phenomenal ( I mean, it is Michael Bay ). And Ultraviolet looks very strange in comparison. There is a lot of video-game cut scene quality CGI shots. There is a very obvious terrible digital makeup effect on Jovovich's face. And a lot of it just gives this bad movie vibe.

Yet, with all those things, Wimmer's sense of style is so fucking amazing that this movie for some reason, works for me.

I remember back in 2008 I had a DVD with a bunch superhero movies from that time. It had the original Sam Raimi Spiderman films. It had the X-men films on it, and the Bryan Singer's shot at a Superman film. It had Timur Bekmambetov's Wanted and Peter Berg's Hancock. And it also had this stupid ass sounding film, with a terrible poster that made me cringe from just looking at it, called Ultraviolet.

I was avoiding ever putting this Ultraviolet movie for quite a while. We watched ( pretty much ) everything else with friends by that point. Only Wanted was a problem, because it starts with an R-rated, super-loud sex scene, and we were a bunch of 11 year olds. It felt a bit cringe. But we got even through that. Ultraviolet was too dumb-sounding to ever put on and watch. Until one day I decided to give it a shot.

After a strange credits sequence, there was this rather surreal scene of these balls falling from a plane, crashing into a huge skyscraper. Then it's revealed that those balls are crash-padded-capsules for a bunch of Ninja type dudes. You get a cool ass action scene with some sci-fi bullshit right away. And for 11 year old me it was so bizarre and so bad-shit crazy that I fell in love with this movie. I saw it maybe 20 times, or more at this point. And re-watching it now, just made me feel this feeling of amazing bullshit again.

Kurt Wimmer has directed a rather decent action film before Ultraviolet called Equilibrium starring Christian Bale. That movie invented a new martial arts style called Gun Kata. Basically it is Gun-foo. Ultraviolet attempts to do the same thing, this time adding also sword fighting into the mix. Which in my opinions is super-motherfucking cool.

I really love how when Violet kills a bunch of duded who stand in a circle, they all fall in a beautiful flower pattern. It is absolutely, incredibly stupid, but so fucking good. And then in one scene there is a flower formation of dudes all pointing their guns at her. And everybody is wearing sick sun-glasses. So obviously the camera flies through the reflections of the sun-glasses as they shoot each other. As in, the camera goes towards the sun-glasses, and then into the reflection, through the sun-glasses, and from there to a different dude with sun glasses. And so on and so forth. For like the majority of the scene. This is some absolutely fucked up shit. And I love every frame of it.

William Fichtner is in it. He is a good motherfucking actor. When he is on screen you immediately see how bad Jovovich and the kid ( Cameron Bright ) are. This kid "6" is kind of what the plot is about. He is both a MacGuffin and an emotional core for Violet. Yet he is really strange. The movie does this trope of a kid who doesn't talk. But then actually can talk just fine. The only movie I know of that pulls this trope off is James Mangold's Logan, where the only reason it works is because we get surprise as she starts talking. She knows apparently only Spanish. While "6" talks English just fine. What the hell is his reason not to speak?

I think while Jovovich works in this film because the film needs an ultra-hot woman to do this character right, Cameron Bright is miscast. He might have won awards and stuff for his previous work ( where the script actually needs him to do something ) but here, the movie needed just a cute kid. And better if the kid was younger than Bright. Or at least not as fucking serious as Bright. He makes this face through out the film, as if he is this amazing serious actor. And what the movie needs is a cute boy the audience will fear for, for the stuff to work.

And then the movie has a scene in the middle of it played entirely on their faces. They communicate something on which the next 5 minutes of the plot will be based on, without saying it, because saying it would hurt too much or something. In this particular scene Cameron Bright is a good actor for the part. But that is like 1% of the movie, and for the rest 99% he isn't the right actor for the part.

If you just want to watch sexy Jovovich kick some Nazi ass, this is very fun movie actually. If you want a movie that makes sense, this is not the movie for you.

Happy Hacking!!!

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  Troler c:0


Movies made as an excuse to show stunning action is probably a genre at this point.

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