June 22: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 2000s Action! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Kurt Wimmer directed the Brian Bosworth movie One Tough Bastard and wrote the remake of The Thomas Crowne Affair and Sphere before he directed Equilibrium, the first movie of his I took notice of. He created a style of fighting, Gun Kata, for the film and it just stands out from so many of the 2000s science fiction action movies. I was beyond excited for Ultraviolet, but wow it had so many problems that I was sure I’d never see it.

Shot digitally on high-definition video, this movie was Wimmer’s attempt at making a comic book movie. There are even tons of Ultraviolet comic covers to give the idea that we’re in the middle of a much longer story. The basic idea is sometime in the near-future, a super soldier experiment leads to the creation of hemophages, vampiric humans that are stronger and smarter than normal humans. Like mutants…keep that in mind.

The war between humans and vampires leads to the end of civilization. There is now only the ArchMinistry, a powerful corporation and joint world government. There’s a resistance that is fighting back and one of their soldiers is Violet Song Jat Shariff (Milla Jovovich). Her latest mission is to break into a blood bank and steal a weapon that can kill her kind. It ends up being a child named Six (Cameron Bright) who is a clone of Vice-Cardinal Ferdinand Daxus (Nick Chinlund) and filled with a virus that can destroy the hemophages. Despite this, Violet is sentimental and allows him to live despite hating all of humanity.

By the end of the movie, it’s revealed that Daxus and the hemophages are working together to create a new virus that will allow them to control even more of the world. William Fichtner also shows up and if I ever make a movie, that guy has to be in it.

Not a lot of it makes sense, but really, we’re here to watch large battles and gun fights. In the post Matrix world, everyone was making movies like this. I just happen to like this one because, well, it’s fun. Who cares that Six spends most of the movie living in a briefcase? Do I need to know motivations? Rotten Tomatoes said, “An incomprehensible and forgettable sci-fi thriller, Ultraviolet is inept in every regard.”

Um…this is a movie where you watch Milla Jovovich in various cool outfits, she has color changing hair and she shoots a whole bunch of religious zealots when she isn’t racing around on a motorcycle. I mean, you tell me that’s what I’m going to see and I’m going to see it.

Anyways…

Wimmer and Jovovich were locked out of the edit by Sony, who said that the movie was too emotional and it needed to be PG-13. They cut it from 120 minutes to 88 minutes. Because of this, the visual effects are visibly unfinished and use incomplete temp-renders that were never meant to be seen outside of the editing room.

Everywhere in the world, this didn’t do well. Well, Japan loved it. They even made an anime sequel, Ultraviolet: Code 044.

In the very same year, Cameron Bright played Leech in X-Men: The Last Stand. His role is to cure mutants, which is just like this movie. He would play a vampire again once he got older. He’s Volturi vampire Alec in Twilight New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn Part 2.

An aside: Gun Kata was taken from Gun Fu. Wikipedia refers to it as a “style of sophisticated close-quarters gunfight resembling a martial arts combat that combines firearms with hand-to-hand combat and traditional melee weapons in an approximately 50/50 ratio.” This martial art first shows up in A Better Tomorrow, directed by John Woo, and gives guns the same style that open hand combat and wuxia movies had within Hong Kong cinema. In the 1990s, it came to America in movies like Desperado, The Replacement Killers (which had Woo’s star Chow Yun-fat in it) and The Matrix. Today, John Wick has taken Gun Fu as far as it can go, but in 2002, Wimmer would use it in Equilibrium.

After the failure of this movie, Wimmer didn’t direct for years until he made Children of the Corn. While he was recovering from this, he wrote Street Kings, Law Abiding Citizen, Salt, the remakes of Total Recall and Point Break, Spell, The Misfits, Expend4bles and The Beekeeper. I hope he gets the opportunity to make another movie and prove his talent to his detractors.