Ultraviolet
For reasons passing understanding, back in the day Benny and I went to see Dungeons & Dragons when it was originally released. In our defence it was a rainy Sunday in Reading, but I’m sure there must have been something better we could have done with our time - even in Reading. In the intervening 6 years I have seen many bad films, but D&D has managed to remain the worst film I’ve ever seen in the cinema. Until now.
Ultraviolet is a film with no redeeming features whatsoever - I went in with absolutely no expectations, and it failed even to meet them. You know how bad Resident Evil: Apocalypse was? By comparison it’s a towering work of cinematic genius - and that has the Toxic Avengers’ slightly less convincing younger brother as the main bad guy. The storyline appears to want to be a cross between V for Vendetta and X-Men 3, but sacrifices any kind of convincing motivation or character development for the sake of terrible, terrible one-liners “Are you mental?” and poorly choreographed fight sequences that seem to exist purely to showcase the fact that Milla Jovovich’s costume changes colour when she gets into a fight. There are, admittedly, a couple of entertaining moments, but these seem so out of context when set against the po-faced seriousness of the rest of the film that you are too busy trying to work out whether they were deliberate touches, or happy accidents that somehow managed to stay off the cutting room floor to actually appreciate them.
Apparently the studio didn’t like the director’s original cut, and so took it out of his hands entirely and re-edited it, trimming some 30 odd minutes from the running time transforming it from an R to a PG-13 in the process. In all honesty I’m not entirely sure how much better the original cut could have been, but I can pretty much guarantee that it couldn’t possibly have been any worse …