Movie Review: Ultraviolet

Ultraviolet (2006) 

Directed by Kurt Wimmer

Written by Kurt Wimmer

Starring Milla Jovovich, Cameron Bright, William Fichtner

Release Date March 3rd, 2006

Published March 6th, 2006

After the government uses genetics to create a race of super soldiers, a blood-borne virus is created and infects the population. Turning everyday Americans into vampire hybrids, the virus is kept under control by the same government scientists who created it through any means necessary. A war between the infected and non-infected is at hand after a weapon is created that allegedly kills all vampires. Hired to obtain the weapon is an infected female assassin named Violet (Milla Jovovich). Little does Violet know that the weapon is in the form of a small child whose blood was engineered to kill vampires.

Cameron Bright plays the kid, Six, a clone of the government's top scientist and bad guy Daxus (Nick Chinlund). He wants his clone back and the vampires dead. The vampires want the kid dead and the only thing standing between the warring factions is Violet, whose protective mothering instincts kick in at the worst possible moment. William Fichtner takes on the role of Violet's only ally, Garth, a scientist and weapon-maker who also nurses a long-suffering crush on Violet. Garth believes the kid could be the key to curing the vampires.

The plot of Ultraviolet is not exactly as clear-cut as my description might make it seem. The whole vampire virus thing is muddled and confusing, as if writer-director Kurt Wimmer could not decide if a virus or vampire would make a better story. Nick Chinlund, as the bad guy of the picture, has his motivation for his evil deeds shift with the wind. That might explain why Chinlund goes all-out chewing the scenery, he can't keep the plot straight so he acts every moment to the back of the room in hopes of distracting us from the confusion with pure bombast.

Milla Jovovich is an effective lead actress. The same action heroine chops she showed in the two Resident Evil pictures serve her well here but, like those failed efforts, Ultraviolet is never good enough to deserve her hard work. Sexy and dangerous, Jovovich gives a performance reminiscent of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill gone sci-fi. She is fluid and deadly with a samurai sword and swift with double-barreled weapons. The plot lets Jovovich down by not providing a compelling context for the action she so lithely and athletically brings to the screen.

Ultraviolet is a step backward for director Kurt Wimmer, whose Equilibrium was a brilliant, but little seen, sci-fi kung fu movie. Wimmer and his stunt people created a new form of martial arts for Equilibrium that they dubbed Gunkata. This combination of martial arts and heavy artillery is once again on display in Ultraviolet but seems tamed somehow.

Ultraviolet has an amped-up body count but is relatively bloodless. There are a number of bodies sliced and diced, but very little blood is shed. In what was ultimately a vain attempt at a teen-friendly rating, the film keeps the bodies piled high but the blood to a minimum in a strangely unsatisfying combination. With so much action and so many bodies falling, bloodlust is a natural reaction. It's a little disappointing to watch a samurai sword in action and never see its aftermath.

The biggest problem with Ultraviolet, however, may not be its confused plotting or wimpy violence but rather the visual components that were supposed to be the film's calling-card. Using the camera technology that only George Lucas had previously employed for his last three Star Wars pics, Ultraviolet lacks the crisp, vivid, textures of Star Wars and instead takes on the milky aesthetic of a bad video game.

Whether it was a lack of experience with the technology or some kind of post-production snafu, the look of Ultraviolet is often out of focus, to the point where I asked the projectionist if there was a problem with the print. There wasn't. The faces of the actors are over exposed causing shadows or trailing; the colors go from vivid to filmy, often within the same scene.

It now seems like no surprise that Ultraviolet was held frin critics until opening weekend--they did not want this information about the film's look getting out.

The one reliable draw of Ultraviolet is star Milla Jovovich, who is quickly becoming the action heroine that Angelina Jolie was supposed to become with the Lara Croft movies. Granted, Jovovich has yet to take the lead in a really good action movie, but she has shown the chops of an action hero in everything from her supporting role in The Fifth Element, to both of the Resident Evil disasters, and now Ultraviolet. Through hard work and, yes, a killer body, Jovovich has managed to place herself above the subpar material and help you forget that she was in some pretty bad movies.

After Equilibrium became a fanboy favorite on DVD, director Kurt Wimmer could write his own ticket for his follow-up and, while Ultraviolet is a failure, you have to respect the risks he takes. Using a technology that neither he nor cinematographer Glen MacPherson knew how to use properly, Wimmer took a risk to create a new look for Ultraviolet and failed spectacularly. You have to respect the attempt, it made for one killer trailer.

Ultraviolet is a disappointment on a number of levels. From failing to give proper life to Milla Jovovich's well-crafted hero to director Kurt Wimmer's squandered potential. However, both will be back and here's hoping they try again together. Ultraviolet may not be successful, but its failure showed the potential a pair of risk-takers like Wimmer and Jovovich have of doing something great in the future.

Movie Review Running Scared

Running Scared (2006) 

Directed by Wayne Kramer 

Written Wayne Kramer

Starring Paul Walker, Cameron Bright, Vera Farmiga, Michael Cudlitz

Release Date February 24th, 2006

Published February 24th, 2006 

Violence for the sake of violence is not necessarily a hallmark of the thriller genre, unless you're Quentin Tarentino. The thriller Running Scared shows why most thrillers begin with a plot and then introduce only the violence necessary to tell the story. Overwhelmed by its blood, guts and body count, Running Scared devolves quickly from a fast paced, Tony Scott inspired thriller into a nonsensical horror film.

Making matters worse is the fact that the film was directed by the terrific young auteur Wayne Kramer who made such a great splash with his debut feature The Cooler. Running Scared is a major step backward for a director with more talent than what this film demonstrates.

Paul Walker stars as Joey Gazelle, a low level mobster with the simple task of getting rid of dirty guns. After a drug deal goes bad and Joey's boss (Johnny Messner) kills a dirty cop, it's up to Joey to get rid of the piece, a pearl handled snub nosed revolver. Joey however has another idea. In covering his own backside he has been taking the hot guns he was supposed to be disposing of and hiding them in his basement in case he needs them for leverage.

Things go bad for Joey when one of his son's friends, Oleg (Cameron Bright) takes the pearl handle gun from his stash and uses it to try and kill his abusive father (John Noble). The kid fails to kill his dad, who also happens to have mob connections, and is now on the streets with the hot piece. Joey must find the kid and retrieve the gun before his partners or the cops find it first.

The plot to Running Scared is a correlative to Robert Altman's brilliant but short lived anthology series Gun which aired briefly on ABC in the mid-nineties. That show followed the path of a gun from one owner to the next and detailed the havoc wreaked in its wake. In the case of the gun in Running Scared it's the lives of mobsters, dirty cops, gang bangers and one small child.

Where Gun was a brilliant verbose little drama, Running Scared is a brutally violent and utterly meaningless mess of a film. Director Wayne Kramer, who made the far more interesting film The Cooler with William H. Macy, directs Running Scared as if he wished he had made a horror film instead of a gritty thriller. Amping up the body count to cover up his lack of a compelling plot, Kramer is forced to rely on his sleepy eyed star to provide the film's driving force and oh what a mistake that is.

Paul Walker with his slacker, frat boy, surfer demeanor is an actor I find insufferable. Though he was not bad in the doggy adventure flick Eight Below he was out acted by a group of huskies. He was okay in the Fast and Furious films but those movies aren't exactly challenging cinema. Running Scared wants to be something a little more than a cheap violent thriller but because Walker's only emotions are confused and sleepy the film falls short of exciting or even playful.

Kramer's love of over the top violence and seeing my sexuality are not merely reminiscent of Tony Scott they are, in Running Scared, an outright ripoff. The whip pan camera work and overlapping film stocks are direct lifts from Scott's last two features Domino and Man On Fire. The ridiculous violence and high body count a nod to Scott's True Romance.

The only originality to seep into this dark, dystopian thriller is a hockey torture scene that has received heavy rotation in the films ad campaign. The look of the scene is clever and the torture is something I had never seen before. The scene is bloody and a bit of a nail biter. Unfortunately this good scene is rare amidst the misguided plot.

Running Scared is a bizarre little film. Violent to the point of parody, the film could qualify as a horror flick for the amount of blood and guts that get spilled but it's all in service of nothing. There is nothing you can take away from the film. This film's many influences, Tony Scott and Quentin Tarentino among others, are each far superior. While Scott's last two films, Domino and Man On Fire were not great films, Scott's direction is amped and always in service of a compelling if flawed plot.

Tarentino is, of course, the master of screen violence. Kill Bill 1 & 2 are the only films outside the horror film genre that can favorably compare body counts with Running Scared. The difference is the violence in Tarentino's masterpieces plays like a blood and guts symphony. Each bullet fired, each slice of a samurai blade a note in a grand opera of eloquent violence. In Running Scared the violence is simply for the sake of being violent. The style of the film, the grit, the color scheme and the whip pans, are merely showing off and never part of a coherent vision of how to present screen violence.

Violence for violence sake is okay in the horror genre, but it gets old quickly in the thriller or noir genre if it is not clearly in service of a good plot. The plot to Running Scared is simply not compelling enough to justify the blood, guts and body count. Pure viscerality can only get a movie so far before you need to give the audience something to really chew on.

Running Scared is a step backward for a director who showed eclectic style in his debut feature. Wayne Kramer's The Cooler was a hard R-rated character piece with an excellent cast that was directed with a purpose. The violence and sexuality of The Cooler worked with its compelling characters and unique plot not against them. There was simply more to that film than the action and flesh displayed.

Running Scared never stops moving which works for maybe 45 minutes but without great characters and not much of a plot the wheels eventually come off and the film flies off the rails.

Movie Review Godsend

Godsend (2004) 

Directed by Nick Hamm 

Written by Mark Bomback 

Starring Greg Kinnear, Rebecca Romijn Stamos, Robert DeNiro, Cameron Bright 

Release Date April 30th, 2004

Published April 29th, 2004

The moral and ethical debate over cloning is fervent ground for drama. That drama was well explored in the little-seen 1997 sci-fi film Gattaca with Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke. That film was set in a universe, years in the future, where cloning was more than a reality, it was a way of life that had replaced nature with science. The latest examination of the thorny issue of cloning takes place in a modern context, a time when cloning is almost a reality. Godsend however, is not as much interested in the science or  morality of cloning as much as it is interested in atmospherics and melodrama.

Adam Duncan (Cameron Bright) has just celebrated his eighth birthday. His mother Jessie (Rebecca Romijn) and father Paul (Greg Kinnear) are happily married living in New York City but they are contemplating a move to the suburbs to find a safer place to raise their son. Their idyllic family life is shattered when a tragic car accident kills Adam as his mother watches helplessly.

At Adam's funeral, the couple meets Dr. Richard Wells (Robert De Niro) who has a strange offer for them. Wells is an expert geneticist and he claims to have perfected a way to clone a human being. Wells' offer is to use some of Adam’s cells, which are useful only for 72 hours after his death, to clone the child back to life. The child can then be genetically replicated and placed in his mother’s womb. Just like in-vitro fertilization, the child could be carried to term and re-born as Adam Duncan down to the last hair on his head.

There are some rules that the couple must agree to first.  One is that the couple must move to Massachusetts to be near Dr. Wells' Godsend research clinic. They must then sever all ties with friends and family. Finally, Dr. Wells must be the only doctor Adam ever sees. Aside from that, the doctor sets the couple up with a beautiful house and a teaching job for Paul. The couple can raise Adam as if he had never died, starting over from his birth. The only question is what will happen to Adam when he crosses the age at which he died.

That last part is where the film draws most of it's drama but it's also the most dubious of the contrivances of the film. There is never any kind of scientific or theoretical reason given for why anything in Adam would change when he turned eight years old, the age he was when he died the first time. It's not like the kid can have all of the experiences he had from his first life again. He's going to meet all new people, spend time with Dr. Wells, go to a different school, his parents are different people than they were before his original death. 

I realize that I am asking questions that the makers of Godsend would rather avoid but these are the questions that this plot raises and it is a fatal flaw for this movie that they can't answer those questions. That could be as easy as making Dr. Wells the real villain, a man trying to turn this boy into an Omen, Damien style villain but that doesn't happen. Robert DeNiro is far too checked out and obviously bored to try and be part of this plot anyway. 

First-time director Nick Hamm does a good job creating a creepy horror atmosphere. Even in the film’s dream sequences, Hamm never resorts to CGI trickery, preferring to create his atmosphere naturally. A challenge he more than meets with the help of cinematographer Kramer Morganthau. Nick Hamm's other achievement is making this cute kid Cameron Bright a viably dangerous presence right up until the end when the film’s second big contrivance kicks in and snuffs out what was good about the film. As the director told Sci Fi Wire, they shot five different endings. Unfortunately, they chose the wrong one.

Greg Kinnear is such a reliable dramatic presence that he is able to ground the film in some kind of reality. Kinnear makes both Rebecca Romijn and Cameron Bright better for having worked with him.

If only Robert De Niro had paid a little more attention to his understated co-star. Lapsing into Jeremy Irons like self-parody, De Niro over-emotes, eats the scemery and generally throws dirt on his legend that grows more tarnished by each subsequent late-career performance.

Godsend isn't as bad as I am making it seem. The director Nick Hamm is very talented and Greg Kinnear is giving it his all to sell this deeply flawed premise. Sadly, with DeNiro lapsing into parodyh out of seeming boredom, and the logical failures of the script and premise, there was no overcoming the flaws in Godsend. Creepy visuals and strong sense of atmosphere are great but when your audience is busy deconstructing your plot flaws instead of being impressed with the look and feel of your movie, it's just not working. 

As muich as I have issues with the movie, I will say that if want to see Godsend, see it for Greg Kinnear genuinely good performance and for the low-tech horror atmosphere created by talented director Nick  that works without any CGI trickery, something most films can't resist.