Ultraviolet

I was expecting a poor-woman’s Aeon Flux, and was surprised. It was better than AF, at least at first. After a while it got tedious, as it only had one thing to do, which was put Ultraviolet (Milla Jovovich) up against thousands and thousands of bad guys at once, and have her kill them all, very fetchingly. The basic tactic of the bad guys here is to form a circle around Ultraviolet, all pointing their weapons at her. Then they all wait, to give her a chance to glare at them, change her hair color, brush her teeth, write out a shopping list, and draw her weapons. After they’ve all killed each other (can you say crossfire, class?), they like the result so well they immediately try it again. These baddies, you understand, were the guys who were rejected as Star Wars Imperial Storm Troopers because they were even worse shots than those pitiful mokes.

Some complained that the CGI (which is almost every scene) was not realistic enough, not “photo-real.” Myself, I think that now that we’ve shown we can do that, it gets tiresome fast. Since this was blatantly a comic book, why not have some of the mega-city be just sketched in? It’s time for some CGI Impressionism.

Forget the plot. It’s stupid. The only reason to see this is Milla Jovovich, who has fascinated me for a while, and who, I learn to my surprise, is even more fascinating than I had known. She was born in and spent her childhood in Kiev, USSR, now Ukraine. English is not her second language, but her third, after Russian and Serbian. (She also speaks French.) She speaks English with absolutely no accent. None at all. She has been a singer and a fashion designer. She was in a dumb little movie called Dummy, where she played a punk rocker so desperate to make it that she agreed to perform Klezmer music with her band at a Jewish wedding, not admitting she’d never heard of Klezmer … and invented the genre of Punk Klezmer, which was very funny and actually good.
So the reason to see this is to see Milla kick ass in a moving comic book. And since the audience for this is pimply adolescent boys who would love to have Milla kick their asses, it logically follows that her outfits show a lot of belly-button, since showing boobs would get an R rating and exclude them from the theater. And come on, what’s the point of ninja fighting if you can’t show your cute little belly button? And leathers, and lovely straight hair that changes color at will. And high heels, can’t go into battle without high heels. And lots of macho guns and swords and shit. Hell, she can kick my ass anytime she wants to. It’d be worth it just for a glimpse of that belly button.