Ultraviolet (2006)

 Ultraviolet (2006)

Starring: Milla Jovovich, Cameron Bright, Nick Chinlund, Sebastien Andrieu, Ida Martin, William Fichtner, David E. Collier

Director: Kurt Wimmer

Action Director: Mike Smith

When is a Hollywood film actually a Hong Kong movie? Well, you can make the argument that the first Blade certainly went in that direction. Similar arguments can be made for Enter the Dragon. Or Bloodsport. Any some of Jet Li’s and Jackie Chan’s Western efforts, too. One movie that won’t land on anyone’s immediate list—mainly because it was a critical and financial failure—is Ultraviolet, director Kurt Wimmer’s follow-up to his dystopian sci-fi cult classic Equilibrium. This film is also set in a dystopia, but ultimately plays out like Blade by way of The Matrix, with visual sensibilities that call to mind Silver Hawk.

Those first two films I mentioned obviously had a strong Hong Kong (and anime, for the latter) influence, while Silver Hawk was a Hong Kong movie. This movie as lots of Hong Kong talent behind the camera. Arthur Wong provided the cinematography; he has worked for Lau Kar-Leung (Shaolin Mantis); Jackie Chan (Operation Condor); Tsui Hark (Once Upon a Time in China); Yuen Woo-Ping (Iron Monkey); and many more great filmmakers. Louis Sit was a co-producer and he worked extensively with Golden Harvest, his credits going all the way back to Enter the Dragon. Line producer Wai Shun-Shia was production manager on a lot of Jet Li’s 1990s films, like Fist of Legend and Bodyguard from Beijing. Art director Chong Kwok-Wing performed the same duties for the likes of Wong Kar-Wai (The Grandmaster) and Ang Lee (Lust, Caution). And the list goes on. So if this feels like a Hong Kong movie, there is a reason.

Backstory time! At some point in the near future, scientists discovered a long-dormant virus somewhere on this Earth. While studying it, they learned it gave its hosts superhuman strength and reflexes and the military brass was poised to use it to create an army of super soldiers, Captain America style. However, the virus had a secondary characteristic: it transformed the host into vampires, who were dubbed “Hemophages” by the government. The virus escaped and an entire race of Hemophages was born. The Medical Industrial Complex took over the government and a COVID-esque Pandemic response was born, with people forever wearing masks in public to safeguard against infection. As the film opens, most of the vampires (let’s just call them that) have been wiped out.

After a random action sequence involving vampires hiding out in metal balls—not unlike New Legend of Shaolin—trying to break into a blood bank or something, we get to the story proper (such as it is). A courier, XPD-154 (Milla Jovavich, of the Resident Evil films), shows up at an important laboratory to pick up a special package. After dozens of blood tests and what have you to prove she isn’t a vampire, she gets the briefcase, which she is to transport to the capitol building, run by Daxus (Nick Chinlund, Con Air and The Chronicles of Riddick). Then another courier arrives claiming to be XPD-154, exposing the first one as a fake. She is in fact Violet Song Jat Shariff, a famed Hemophage terrorist and assassin. Violet escapes with the briefcase and lots of chasing and gunplay ensues.

She makes it back to the tower where her boss, Nerva (Sebastien Andrieu), resides. While taking the elevator up to his quarters, she looks inside the briefcase and finds an entire young boy inside—thanks to flat-scan/tesseract technology (or “dimensional compression”). Nerva thinks that the boy has some antigen inside of him that will wipe out the vampires, so he wants to kill the boy, named Six (Cameron Bright, one of the creepier child actors from the 2000s). At that moment, Violet’s maternal instincts kick in and she decides to protect him. She fights her way through the Triad assassins who occupy the upper levels of the tower and goes on the lam, with both Daxus’s men and Nerva’s men on her tail. Her only ally is Hemophage scientist Garth (William Fichtner, of Black Hawk Down and Elysium), who is the Whistler to her Blade. What he discovers in Six is that the antigen in his blood is not fatal to vampires…but humans. So just what game is Daxus playing?

The story is quite thin, although I can see elements that were later copied in Underworld: Awakening and, strangely enough, copied from Jackie Chan’s The Tuxedo. Once you find out what the villain’s master plan is, it doesn’t feel all that different from “give the population tainted water and then force them to buy from you to avoid instantaneous dehydration.” The thing is that all of those elements practically amount to background details as the movie focuses on a barrage of action sequences—sword fights, gun-kata sequences, and motorcycle chases on the sides of buildings.

A lot of the action beats borrow from The Matrix, which was the style at the time. However, unlike Joel Silver’s post-Matrix films that had slow-motion wire-fu but no explanation why, this film actually tries to explain (at least in basic terms) why these characters are doing the stuff they do. In The Matrix, the loading program into the Matrix allowed for uploading weapons and equipment of any type. In this film, they have dimensional compression technology that allows the characters to hide entire arsenals in a small space and draw weapons from virtually out of nowhere. In The Matrix, the characters could bend the laws of physics, mainly because those laws were the results of the Matrix’s programming and any good hacker can bend or break the rules of a program. In this movie, the characters have devices that allow them to alter their own personal gravity—like mini-reactors—thus allowing them to run on ceilings and nutty things like that.

With all that said, the action is a mixed bag. Kurt Wimmer invented the “Gun-Kata” style—probably inspired by the Bullet Ballets of the 1980s and 1990s—in Equilibrium and several action sequences display more of that. Most notably, when Milla Jovavich is surrounded by a bunch of gun-toting Triads on top of a building and a firefight breaks out. Those sequences are fine. Unfortunately, instead of getting a Hong Kong fight choreographer for the movie (as they should have done), they got Mike Smith. Nothing against the man, but for a movie with so much Hong Kong flavor, getting the guy best known for Steven Seagal’s Pistol Whipped and Urban Justice is probably not your best bet. Mind you, those two are among Seagal’s best DTV films, but Ailen Sit or Ching Siu-Tung would have been a better fit for something like this. The fights are very short and theatrical: lots of spinning and twisting, ending with stuntmen falling over in unison or toppling over in rhythm. It matches the purposefully artificial nature of the visuals, but there is no standout fight. Oh, and in one sequence, they completely rip off the well scene from Lone Wolf and Cub: Perambulator at the River Styx.

The movie will probably be remembered (by anyone who hasn’t forgotten it) for its visuals. The set design is an interesting amalgamation of religious and medical iconography, with lots of white being used. There is futuristic technology that allows Milla to change her clothes and hair color at the drop of a hat. That was adopted later in Wall-E and reminded me of Silver Hawk, where Michelle Yeoh had a different outfit and hairstyle in every scene (or how Li Bing-Bing’s hair color changed for each fight sequence). The CGI is very cartoonish, especially during the helicopter-motorcycle chase sequence, but I suspect that was kinda the point. It almost feels like how Shaw Brothers films, especially their more elaborate wuxia pian, were obviously setbound, but that was part of the aesthetic. Another great visual is the opening credits, set to a montage of faux-Ultraviolet comic book covers that don’t actually exist, but emphasize the comic-book nature of the film.

The film is very much “all sizzle and no steak,” or “all style and no substance.” And this may be the first vampire film I saw in which the vampires didn’t do anything vampire-ish throughout.

This review is part of Fighting Female February 2025