Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Bernhardt reviewed the 2004 Stephen Sommers film Van Helsing. Today, Greg looks at the 2006 Kurt Wimmer film, Ultraviolet. This article will contain spoilers.
Ultraviolet was the first – and to this day remains the only – movie where I walked out of the theater partway through. Even 20 years ago, with the taste in media of a post-college alcoholic cretin, I knew this was unwatchable. And so when it came up on our Patreon poll the only reasonable thing to do was to call dibs, not that there was a lot of competition on that front. I needed to close the loop on it, and Bernhardt deserved a break after we made him watch Dracula 2000 and Van Helsing on back-to-back weeks.
Writer and director Kurt Wimmer had been kicking around Hollywood for a bit, but this was his first time sitting in both chairs. His first two movies were an HBO original (for the zoomers this is the equivalent to a Netflix release, and for the boomers it’s like the ABC Movie of the Week) starring Brian Bosworth, and then the 2002 dorm room classic Equilibrium, an idiot’s hyper-violent Brave New World by way of The Matrix. The latter encompasses 90% of why I wanted to see this one in the first place. Equilibrium isn’t a good movie – its politics and themes are shallow, unsubtle, and largely stolen from other works – but there are a few interesting visuals and it features what is, in retrospect, a shockingly stacked cast, with early-career performances from Christian Bale, Emily Watson, Taye Diggs, and Sean Bean (probably the most famous of the lot at the time). I didn’t really know who any of them were back then, so the real appeal was the gun-based karate moves and how Taye Diggs gets his face sliced off with a samurai sword. I re-watched parts of it in preparation for this review, and it’s honestly shocking how cheap and corny it is, but that’s hindsight for you.
Wimmer’s follow-up and first go at having something approximating a real budget was Ultraviolet, a movie so bad he wouldn’t get another directing gig for 15 years, and his writing going forward would be largely siloed to remakes and sequels. If nothing else, it proved that either Equilibrium was a fluke and he only had one good movie in him (the Luc Besson Fifth Element type of director) or that he was never actually any good and we were wrong to trust him in the first place (the Zach Braff Garden State type). I suspect the latter: Equilibrium was never “good,” even Back In The Day, but the fights – which were insanely, life-changingly bad ass at the time – have generally not held up.
The first eye-roll of this script is that yes, obviously, the heroine of Ultraviolet is a woman named Violet. She’s a sort of not-legally-actionable riff on Blade: Dracula powers combined with human morality, and she needs some kind of injectable goop to avoid going feral. Your vampires here are the hemophages, a lumpenproletariat infected with a cool blood disease, who are hunted for sport. A rational explanation is present, but extremely hand-wavy, which is what marks this as belonging to the tradition of sci-fi virus-based vampires instead of folklore/fantasy magic-based ones. That, and the fact that the soundtrack is the world’s shittiest generic techno. That’s a hint also.
It’s sometime in the future, and the world’s goofiest technology (extradimensional hammerspace, gravity manipulation, you can change the color of your hair and clothes at will, and make realistic 3d hologram phone calls) has been used to turn an ancient disease into a super-soldier drug, but also a virus that turns you into a Dracula, which gets you thrown into a concentration camp. This is called “The Blood Wars” and it is not going well for the vampires. Everyone is paranoid about catching the Dracula Disease, which at least gives the stuntmen/mooks a reason to wear PPE and gasmasks, which sure reads differently in 2025 than it did in 2006. Violet (Jovovich) is a leader of the resistance, and I’m guessing she isn’t very good at her job based on how most of the Draculas are dead already. As further evidence, the Resistance first appears by getting massacred on what I can only call a Blood Heist.
This ends up being secondary to Violet’s own heist, to steal a weapon from Vice-Cardinal Daxus that will kill all Draculas. The weapon is, surprise, a kid. He’s made entirely from anti-Dracula cells, and the plan is to blend him up and aerosolize the chunks. The Resistance wants to kill him, and the church (I guess? Guy’s title is Vice-Cardinal), wants him back to kill him differently, so Violet, due to Maternal Instincts, takes the kid and runs, hoping to use his anti-vampirocytes to cure Draculism without killing the hosts. Typical action movie stuff; lone hero trying to play both sides. There’s a lot of action here in the first act, most of it either blatant CGI or in – and I intend this in the meanest way possible – sets that look like a comic book, but almost no blood. Relevant to mention here that Ultraviolet is rated PG-13.
William Fichtner finally shows up 40 interminable minutes in, as Garth, the nerd sidekick with the safe house to crash in, because of the mandated mid-movie break in the action to accommodate an exposition dump. Meanwhile Vice-Cardinal Daxus strikes a deal with half of the Resistance after shooting the other half, which is a cornball scene even by the standards of this movie, but also includes the fun visual gag of him pulling a fully-loaded gun out of a hermetically sealed medical supply pouch. I’m still not sure why the tyrant dictator has “vice” in his title, if he’s clearly in charge. (Bernhardt here — I am confident it’s because Wimmer, one of our nation’s most powerful dumb thinkers, thinks “vice” is a cool word for cool evil guys. Vice-Cardinal…and Vice. Cardinal. Dude! Get it? -Ed.) Garth, by the way, is also a vampire, the extent of which is that he has to wear sunglasses before he goes outside in full sunlight. Which is honestly just something normal people do.
He tells Violet that the kid, whose name is Six, is useless at curing diseases (because he’s like ten years old), so she takes Six to another one of the interchangeable technicolor airport terminals that this movie was filmed in, and ditches him, before turning back around to pick him up, but by then he’s been captured by the Resistance. There’s a bit of inter-Dracula violence, which looks indistinguishable from normal movie fights, and the resistance leader (who’s name I never bothered to learn but he’s vaguely French) tells Violet that actually Six is an anti-human bomb, not anti-Dracula. There is more violence. All of these fights are the same: Violet kills like 20 guys with either a submachine gun or a sword, and never gets hurt or even hit.
At this point she might be the only vampire left alive, so she takes Six (revealed to be a clone of Daxus) and leaves again, to take the kid to his dad and get him cured. When she arrives, as the format demands, Daxus explains his plan. It is, since pretty much all the Draculas are dead, to develop another plague that will kill all humans, so he has a reason to keep being a weirdo who doesn’t go outside and also sell the antidote (guessing this is horse paste). Anyway, the kid dies.
Violet goes catatonic, gets shot for once, almost dies, is apparently just left there on the ground unattended (?), to be rescued off-screen by Garth. She has a little menty-b about it, then Garth (who’s house I thought she was still in), calls and tells her the kid left her a note, and that she has to go to the Cardinal’s Office, located in a PS2 cutscene, to get it. The kid – a tween clone raised in a pod – apparently knew, and wrote down, the formula for retro-Dracula-virals. Sure, whatever.
The last 15 minutes are again dictated by the rigid adherence to a by-the-numbers format. Violet gets back to early-movie form and kills a ton of dudes, starting with a very very bad riff on the Matrix lobby fight that continues up several flights of stairs. There is – ironic for a Dracula movie, and implausible for how many swords are used – almost no blood, except for as a plot device, where Violet throws some blood on the Cardinal to fuck with him. Even then all it does is make him mad enough to fight her, a thing that was going to happen anyway.
Five minutes from the end of the movie, we find out via flashback exposition-dump that Daxus is also a Dracula, when he turns out the lights to fight Violet (he apparently got the good night vision, and she didn’t, making this virtually the only vampire power in the entire film). It’s a fun idea – though I feel obligated to point out that Wimmer employed the exact same last minute twist in Equilibrium – instantly countered by her setting her sword on fire and stabbing him by torchlight. She also sets him on fire, a move that would have killed him even if he wasn’t a vampire, so again I’m not sure what the Dracula angle is really doing for the movie.
At any rate, you know how this ends without having to watch it: Daxus dies, Violet brings the kid back to life by turning him into a Dracula, and they quite literally ride off into the sunset.
This is where I realized that they blew their tiny CGI budget on the motorcycle/helicopter fight early in the film, because as Violet and the kid are leaving the Cardinal’s office, the cityscape of slums around it are so poorly rendered as rusty cubes with no detailing that I legitimately thought they were stacked haybales at first. I’m watching this on a laptop screen, and I cannot imagine how bad it must have looked in a theater (I walked out before this part). That’s probably also why the flip belt disappears after the first fight, and why it’s all gymnastics and swords after that.
Probably the most frustrating thing about this movie is that Wimmer somehow got worse at directing action sequences. An entire car chase seemingly takes place inside the computer. The gun-fu looks less like martial arts and more like breakdancing. Even setting aside the mix of disastrous CGI, clearly green-screened closeups, and cheap sets, the hideous costumes, and vaseline coating the lens, it’s just hard to tell what’s going on in the midst of all the kinetic editing and camera cuts. In a post-Matrix world you simply cannot be directing fight scenes that look like they were filmed for a Bad Boy music video. You had to have to known better.
A critical and commercial failure, I want to place blame for this debacle almost entirely on Wimmer, but I honestly can’t. Some of it might be the budget constraints – thirty million dollars wasn’t a lot of money even then for a major motion picture – but consider that Sunshine came out a year later, for only (“only”) ten million more, and it doesn’t look like a SyFy original the way this thing does. The cast doesn’t do any heavy lifting – they aren’t as well-known or, honestly, as good as what he lucked into for Equilibrium, with basically Jovovich and Fichtner (always a delight, in a quietly workmanlike way) as the only members famous enough to even have a Wikipedia entry. Finally, and most disastrously, the studio apparently meddled with the film to an absurd degree, but obviously there’s no way to know what was their problem and what was Wimmer’s. Maybe he got Snyder-ed and there’s a better version of this movie on an editing room floor, or maybe he Snyder-ed himself and wrote something incoherent and unfilmable. We’ll probably never know. The one piece of restraint we know was applied, and this probably does hold the movie back from being as gonzo as it needed to be, is the PG-13 rating. An R-rated cut would probably not have saved Ultraviolet, but some additional buckets of blood could at least have livened it up a bit.
Even at a slim 90 minutes I will not, can not, recommend this movie. It functions, to the extent that it does function, mostly as an example of early-2000s budget bin CGI (even judged by the standards of the time, it’s bad) and as an advertisement for Milla Jovovich’s personal trainer. She is legitimately jacked, and to prove it, at no point in this movie is her midriff covered. As entertainment though, woof. Even the action sequences – utterly necessary for a movie like this, and up to this point Wimmer’s strong suit – fall flat. This is a movie where a lady drives a motorcycle up the side of a building and through a helicopter, which by rights should be extremely cool, and it just does nothing for me. It looks like they filmed it over a weekend at a closed-down Biodome, with nothing but a truck full of trenchcoats and colored lightbulbs to work with, and green-screened the rest.
In the context of this column, Ultraviolet’s gravest sin is that it’s barely even about Draculas. A few characters have fangs, and while I don’t need every vampire to be arch, at least give me a fang-bearing hiss or two. Something, anything at all. As far as powers and weaknesses, all of the hemophages are seen going outside in the sun, none of them seem overly strong, fast, or agile compared to a normal hollywood action hero, they can and do all die to normal wounds from bullets and swords, and none of them drink (or even talk about wanting to drink) any blood. They could have left the vampire angle out entirely, called the hemophages something different, and released this in 2022 as a bad analogy for COVID.
It’s really not a vampire movie in any way that matters, and I will never forgive Goonhammer for putting this on our watchlist. This is worse than the Underworld series. It’s arguably on the level of Bloodrayne or any of that run of video game adaptations, just without the charm of having source material to reference. Even ranking it just in the bursting subgenre of “Milla Jovovich beating the snot out of people” films, there’s five or six Residents Evil out there. Without having watched any of them I’d wager a considerable sum that they’re all better uses of your time than Ultraviolet.
Look, nobody expected this to be Blade Runner-level science fiction, or Blade-level Vampire fiction, but this is bad. You can – but I want to stress that you shouldn’t – stream it on Hulu. Your regular author will return next week, with 2005’s BloodRayne.
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