Ultraviolet

"I live in a world you may find hard to understand," says heroine Violet, in the worst bit of voice-over exposition since Blade Runner, at the start of this film. She's quite right. Nothing bears much resemblance to reality; nor is it internally consistent. What it does resemble, rather charmingly, is an early Eighties pop video impression of 2006.

In this pseudo-future, the world is no longer "defined by terrorism," but rather by fear of disease - HIV, bird flu, etc seem to have slipped the creator's mind. The disease in this case is a variety of vampirism, which has set humans against haemovores in a war which the former are about to lose.

In desperation, they send their best agent to steal a purported super-weapon, which turns out to be a biological agent, encased in a young human boy. But Violet, having lost a baby herself, as we are told several times - presumably because it is assumed we wouldn't expect her to care otherwise - takes it upon herself to protect and try to save the boy, as everybody else aims to kill or retrieve him. Cue what is essentially one long chase through badly staged battles and assorted photoshop filters. Why is all this happening? "What do we care?" asks the villain.

Films like Ultraviolet are few and far between. In most cases, when a project starts to go this badly wrong, somebody will step in and stop it, but in this case nobody seems to have noticed. Milla Jovovich apparently loved the script, which was written especially with her in mind - one can only conclude that this is because an actress whose first language was English would have noticed how bad it was more quickly. Not only is it packed full of truly stupid lines, many of its sentences make no sense at all and in several cases it's clear that the writer doesn't understand what the longer words mean (the child is described as "a maternal surrogate" and Violet as "a monolith"). The effect of this is to make what might otherwise be a waste of an hour-and-a-half into one of the funniest films this year, not least because it takes itself so seriously.

It runs the gamut of thriller cliches, with the Gothic graveyard fight and thwarted romantic interlude ("Why do you never let anyone in?") particularly hilarious. During the fight sequences, enemies repeatedly arrange themselves so as to aim past Violet at one another's heads, or simply run towards her and spontaneously die. Attempts to copy Equilibrium's gun-kata are badly mishandled, and supporting actors repeatedly fudge their moves so as to make Violet look good.

When he can't work out how to resolve such an encounter, writer/director Kurt Wimmer merely cuts to something else and returns later to show his heroine walking away from the bodies. His approach to plot is similar, with numerous sequences both unnecessary and unexplained. The CGI effects often look as though they've been drawn with marker pen and the choreography is terrible. The final duel, with what looks like a vegetable cleaver going up against a bread knife, hides in the dark in the hope that we'll imagine something better.

The most unfortunate thing about the film is that it has been given a 15 certificate when its natural audience would have been 12-year-old boys with a fondness for computer games. There's nothing inappropriate for that age group, the violence being no more vicious than in many pre-watershed TV programmes. Despite its playful credit sequence, Ultraviolet isn't a comic adaptation (one wonders if it hoped it could gain credibility that way), but imitates a game very well.

For other viewers, there's always Jovovich in a series of revealing outfits, but it's disappointing to see her not even trying to act, given that she really can be very good. Ultimately, if one approaches it the right way, this film is a great deal of fun, but I would strongly recommend against paying money to see it. At one point the villain observes, "A vampire and a dying child - what a pathetic picture." Quite.