Future schlock

Reviewed - Ultraviolet: Ultraviolet starts unpromisingly with its eponymous heroine delivering enough expository voiceover to cover the plotlines of several other movies. What's left to tell after all of that is meagre.

Writer-director Kurt Wimmer cites as his inspiration the gritty 1980 John Cassavetes thriller Gloria, starring Gena Rowlands as a gutsy, middle-aged New Yorker saving a young boy from the Mafia. Sidney Lumet directed an undistinguished remake in 1999 with Sharon Stone in the lead. But for all its deficiencies, it certainly eclipses Wimmer's reworking of the source material in Ultraviolet, which transposes the story to the late 21st century.

Amazingly, not a lot has changed after all those years, although security checks are even more time- onsuming than at Dublin airport, motorbikes can be driven up and down the sides of buildings and, in a throwback to Sars fears, people wear facemasks colour co-ordinated with their wardrobe.

A blankly inexpressive Milla Jovovich plays Ultraviolet, a leatherclad resistance fighter from a mutant race of humans infected with a vampire  virus. The villain, vice cardinal Daxus (Nick Chinlund), wears bizarre nasal appendages and is determined to destroy the mutants and a laboratory-bred boy named Six (Cameron Bright from Birth and Thank You for Smoking), who has some special powers.

Daxus has a vast army on his side, but even when they shower Ultraviolet with bullets, not one ever manages to hit her, while she somehow can eliminate dozens of them in mere seconds.

She also demonstrates how disadvantageous dreadlocks can be in a tussle, as Trinidad & Tobago defender Brent Sanchez discovered just before Peter Crouch's alleged "Hair of God" goal in the World Cup last week.

The CGI work in Ultraviolet is dated and unimaginative, and the onedimensional characters talk gibberish throughout this dire, pathetically silly yarn. It looks and plays like a computer game, but  without a remote control the viewer has to sit there and experience it passively.

Which is, of course, entirely pointless, just like the movie itself.