Ultraviolet
A very stylish computer game. But watching a computer game isn't that much fun, they're meant to be interactive. CGI makes things possible that didn't used to be possible but even that isn't enough to carry a movie.
Milla Jovovich as the deadly Ultraviolet alternated between cold blooded assassin and tender protector of a child. It didn't work. Pick one or the other or at least make a better transition.
Milla was in several outnumbered combat scenes and of course, dispatched her adversaries with deadly skill. Those scenes left me cold. I hope they haven't reached a saturation point. A desensitation. When Brandon Lee jumped on that table in The Crow and gunned down the bad guys and when Neo and Trinity entered the building with guns blazing to save Morpheus, those scenes gave me chills. But Milla in Ultraviolet...nothing. Here's hoping that was only because it was a bad movie.
Mostly, Ultraviolet was like a live action (with heavy CGI) anime. And maybe 10 to 15 year olds will like it. But I don't think most of those older will be too impressed.
And that leads to another point... Movies with cold blooded assassins and deaths by the dozens (or hundreds) don't seem to work with less than an R rating. That may have been Aeon Flux's downfall and maybe Ultraviolet too. You just can't sanitize a story that has deadly combat as its main theme. Kill Bill and Sin City worked great and they were R rated.
An R rated movie is not worth watching on network television because all the "naughty" bits are removed. The movie has been castrated. Well, the same might be true for Ultraviolet type movies that are rated PG13. A movie about death and killing has been "cleaned up" to reach a wider audience. I think that works in reverse. The sanitation actually hurts the movie so much that no one wants to see it. The "street cred" is gone.
A PG13 Ultraviolet might have worked if it was a very good movie but it wasn't.
I'm torn between a C- and a D+
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