This is the first Christy pick of 2017! Yay! We actually decided to watch it together, which requires some negotiation since she lives in South Carolina and I live in Maryland. At the appointed time, we fired up our cell phones, settled in and pressed play on our respective blu-ray players. And then the troubles began.The first was a technical issue we had not foreseen. She had the extended edition while I had the theatrical. There's only six minutes of footage difference between the two but it was enough to throw off our sync.
The second problem was that we were watching Ultraviolet, one of the worst movies Milla Jovovich has ever done and that is counting entries 4-6 of the Resident Evil franchise. According to Christy's research (IMDb), the film was originally a full 120 minutes but the studio had it re-edited because they felt it didn't highlight enough of the action, and cut it down to 88 minutes. The extended edition only brings it back up to 94 minutes so I don't know what happened to the rest of it. Or if it would have helped at all.
In the near-ish future, a virus has turned some people into vampires. The Archministry has finally developed a weapon that will rid them of the hemophages (because vampire is too plebeian a word) but it is stolen by Violet (Milla Jovovich). Despite being told not to open the case, she does it anyway and discovers that the weapon is actually a child (Cameron Bright) whose blood contains an antigen that will supposedly destroy vampires forever. She knows the other vampires will just kill the boy outright and she can't exactly turn him back over to the Archministry, so she goes on the run with him.
Honestly, this is a dumb movie with terrible CGI that's not worth watching even to see how bad it is. The action is frenetic and constant (thanks to the hatchet job done by the studio) and doesn't fit in with the non-action parts at all. The cut portions apparently explain about Violet's past and how she desperately wanted to be a mother but had successive miscarriages, which would have gone a long way towards understanding her reluctance to just dump the boy. I don't know that it would have improved the movie enough to make it passable but it couldn't have hurt.
Hey, I never saw this, so thanks for taking that bullet for me. I still think her best work was in 5th Element. But that's a nearly perfect movie by a stunning director, so it's hard to measure up to that.
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