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Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil, The Fifth Element), Cameron Bright (X-Men 3), Nick Chinlund (The Legend of Zorro) and William Fichtner (The Longest Yard) star in this theatrical set in the late 21st century, a subculture of humans have emerged who have been modified genetically by a vampire-like disease (Hemophagia), giving them enhanced speed, incredible stamina and acute intelligence, and as they are set apart from "normal" and "healthy" humans, the world is pushed to the brink of worldwide civil war (a war between humans and hemophages) aimed at the destruction of the "diseased" population. In the middle of this crossed-fire is - an infected woman - Ultraviolet, who finds herself protecting a nine-year-old boy who has been marked for death by the human government as he is believed to be a threat to humans.As an overdose of ey! e candy,
Ultraviolet can be marginally recommended as the second-half of a double-feature with
Aeon Flux. Both films are disposable adolescent fantasies featuring a butt-kicking babe (in this case, the svelte and sexy Milla Jovovich) in a dystopian future, and both specialize in the kind of barely-coherent, video-game storytelling that's constantly overwhelmed by an over-abundance of low-budget CGI. Director Kurt Wimmer fared much better with his earlier film
Equilibrium, but he's trying for a lively comic-book vibe here (beginning with
Hulk-like opening credits) with a digitally enhanced,
Tron-like color palette. It largely suits this late-21st century story of a "blood war" between the ultra-violent Violet (Jovovich), member of a vampire-like group of resistance fighters infected with a man-made virus called the Hemophage, and the human Vice Cardinal Daxus (Nick Chinlund), who's determined to eliminate Violet's kind once and for all. Wim! mer takes all of this way too seriously, crafting a plot invol! ving Vio let's rescue of a human clone boy (Cameron Bright) that's intended as an homage to John Cassevetes' 1980 drama
Gloria, but Wimmer's good intentions are mostly lost in a repetitive series of chaotically choreographed fight scenes, mostly involving the tight-bodied Jovovich wiping out dozens of armor-clad enemies. It's all too numbingly hectic to qualify as a satisfying movie, but sci-fi buffs should give it a look anyway, if only to see how locations in Shanghai and Hong Kong contribute to the film's futuristic design.
--Jeff ShannonMilla Jovovich stars as Kat, a beautiful bad girl with a passion for guns and danger. Stuck in a life of crime and controlled by her ruthless, drug-dealing boyfriend Big Al (Angus Macfadyen), she wants more than what he has to offer. When Kat starts making her own deals and Big Al’s sidekick (Stephen Dorff) professes his love for her, tensions rise and jealousy explodes. Desperate to start a better life, Kat knows revenge is the on! ly answer. Now, with help on her side, she can take down Big Al once and for all.Milla Jovovich, Steve Zahn, Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez star in this gripping suspense-thriller about an island vacation that turns deadly. Honeymooners Cliff (Zahn) and Cydney (Jovovich) are hiking a jungle trail to a remote Hawaiian beach when they hear that police have uncovered a grisly murder scene and the suspected killers are somewhere nearby. Unsure whether to stay or flee, the pair joins two other couples and things start to go horribly wrong. Far from civilization, a brutal battle for survival begins where danger lurks along every twist of the path and no one is who they seem. From director David Twohy comes the suspenseful film critics call, “a clever, heart-pounding thriller†(Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle).The good old B-movie flame burns bright in
A Perfect Getaway, David Twohy's rip-snorting guessing game about a vacation gone very, very bad. It must h! ave sounded nice in the planning stages: an isolated honeymoon! trek to a remote beach on Kauai, with nothing but backpacks, Hawaiian breezes, and the occasional pleasant encounter with a fellow wayfarer on the hiking trail. That was the plan for newlyweds Cliff and Cydney, anyway, before a shocking murder in Honolulu, the night before the hike, raised the red flag of suspicion. What we're left with is six couples on a lonely trail in paradise, a murderer (but probably two murderers), and a great deal of anxiety. Cliff and Cydney are played by Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich; Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez are a pair of friendly but vaguely disturbing trailmates; Chris Hemsworth and Marley Shelton are a downright creepy couple who won't go away. Twohy has a knack for infectious concepts (see also
Pitch Black and
The Arrival) and this one is grabby; he's also got a mysterious ability to play the premise straight yet somehow have a great deal of fun with it (for instance, there's much trail talk about the rules of screenwriting, w! hich comes across as playful rather than clumsily self-conscious). The casting works, even if it's difficult for Milla Jovovich to seem in danger from anybody else in the world. Timothy Olyphant is the standout, as a former Special Ops soldier whose survival skills are impressive-bordering-on-scary. Although the film is undeniably built as a whodunit, worry less about the big "reveal" than about having a good time with fun pulp material. Come to think of it, though, the reveal is well played too.
--Robert Horton Stills from A Perfect Getaway (Click for larger image) In remote Alaska, citizens have been mysteriously vanishing since the 1960s. Despite multiple FBI investigations, the truth behind the phenomena had never been discoveredâ€"until now. While videotaping therapy sessions with traumatized patients, psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich) unwittingly exposes terrifying revelations of multiple victims whose claims of being visited by alien figures all share disturbingly identical details. Based on actual case studies, The Fourth Kind uses Dr. Tyler’s never-before-seen archival footage alongside dramatic reenactments to present the most disturbing evidence ever documented in this provocative thriller critics are calling “terrifyingly real…The most shocking alien abduction movie to date.†â€"Tim Anderson, BLOODY-DISGUSTING.COMNome, Alaska: the edge of the world. What better place for the extraterrestrials to conduct their fiendish abduction experiments? Or so the makers of
The! Fourth Kind insist, in their grim attempt to reveal the truth about these mysterious disappearances. You know the movie means business when actress Milla Jovovich (as herself, without makeup, even) strides toward the camera in the opening moments and introduces things by warning us that we are about to see and hear actual tapes from psychotherapy sessions in which patients recover repressed memories. We might find it disturbing. Yes, but isn't that why we're watching the movie? Director Olatunde Osunsanmi soon appears onscreen himself, interviewing the real psychologist whom Jovovich plays, and throughout the film there are rough-looking videos of real people freaking out during hypnosis sessions--and even a bit of alien screeching caught on audio tape. Yep, it's all real, except it's all fake.
The Fourth Kind has an ingenious marketing idea, which is to breathlessly convince the audience they are seeing actual footage of the supposed events, even to the point o! f playing the video excerpts next to the studio-shot scenes wi! th actor s. After a while, you realize that's all the movie has: the audience's willingness to believe there's a ghost of a chance this might have happened. As a horror movie, the thing is clinical and detached, and when you've figured out the bogusness of the conceit, that doesn't leave much. Elias Koteas and Will Patton join Jovovich in the heated story--or should we say, reconstructions of actual events. Aw, phooey.
--Robert HortonMILLA The Divine Comedy (1994 US 11-track silk-screened picture CD debut album featuring Gentleman Who Fell Your Life Charlie and Clock picture/lyric booklet sleeve K2-27984)You'd expect this to be a travesty. Milla Jovovich is a model and actress (
The Fifth Element,
He Got Game) who decided to put out an album of dark, lyrical art-rock in the manner of Dead Can Dance or This Mortal Coil. That's a demanding genre, littered with the bones and witchy jewelry of dozens of histrionic types who got the image thing right, but who never i! roned out the "singing" and "songwriting" aspects of it all. Model? Actress? (Gong!) ... Next! Except
The Divine Comedy is a stunningly good album, with folky-pastoral instrumentation, haunting, accomplished vocals, and tight songwriting. There are, it's true, session pros all over this CD--which tempers the awe a bit--but nonetheless, it's a real gem from an unlikely source.
--Gavin McNettResident Evil Something rotten is brewing beneath the industrial mecca known as Raccoon City. Unknown to its millions of residents, a huge underground bioengineering facility known as The Hive has accidentally unleashed the deadly and mutating T-virus, killing all of its employees. To contain the leak, the governing supercomputer, Red Queen, has sealed all entrances and exits. Now a team of highly-trained super commandos including Rain (Michelle Rodriguez -
The Fast and the Furious,
Girlfight), Alice (Milla Jovovich -
The Fifth Element! ) and Matt (Eric Mabius -
Cruel Intentions) must race t! o penetr ate The Hive in order to isolate the T-virus before it overwhelms humanity. To do so, they must get past the Red Queen's deadly defenses, face the flesh-eating undead employees, fight killer mutant dogs, and battle The Licker, a genetically mutated savage beast whose strength increases with each of its slain victims.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse After narrowly escaping the horrors of the underground Hive facility, Alice (Milla Jovovich) is quickly thrust back into a war raging above ground between the living and the Undead. As the city is locked down under quarantine, Alice joins a small band of elite soldiers, led by Valentine (Sienna Guillory,
Love, Actually) and Carlos (Oded Fehr,
The Mummy Returns), enlisted to rescue the missing daughter of Dr. Ashford, the creator of the mutating T-virus. It's a heart-pounding race against time as the group faces off against hordes of blood- thirsty zombies, stealthy Lickers, mutant canines and th! e most sinister foe yet. Written and produced by the visionary director of
Resident Evil, Paul W.S. Anderson (
Alien Vs. Predator) and directed by Alexander Witt,
Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a superior sci-fi suspense sequel.
Resident Evil: Extinction Milla Jovovich is back in the third chapter of the hugely successful
Resident Evil franchise. This action-packed horror film is set in the Nevada desert and filled with intense special effects and more zombie terror.
Las Vegas means fun in the sun. Well? at least the sun is still there. Except for a few rusting landmarks, it looks pretty much like the rest of the desert - or the whole country, for that matter. The crowds are now flesh-eating zombies: the mass undead, the oozing, terrifying sludge of what remains. Here, the newly upgraded Alice, along with her crew (Oded Fehr, Mike Epps, Ali Larter, Ashanti) will make a final stand against evil - with one goal: to! turn the undead dead again.
Resident Evil Ma! rilyn Ma nson worked on the soundtrack, so it's no surprise that
Resident Evil is best enjoyed by headbangers, goth guys, and PlayStation junkies. Like the interactive game it's based on, this horror hybrid pits a small band of SWAT-like commandos (including Milla Jovovich and
Girlfight's Michelle Rodriguez) against a ravenous hoard of zombies, resulting in a gorefest that only sociopaths could love. The tenacious heroes are trapped inside the Hive--an underground complex where an evil corporation conducts illegal research with a deadly virus--and the zombies (reanimated corpses of sacrificed employees) are fodder for endless rounds of gunfire. It's utter nonsense (not unlike director Paul W.S. Anderson's previous
Event Horizon), so your best defense is to wallow in it or avoid this trash altogether. A few cool sequences are borrowed from better films (that slice-and-dice laser is cribbed from the 1998 Canadian shocker
Cube), but if you're in the mood for ! heavy-metal carnage, this movie's for you. --Jeff Shannon
Resident Evil: Apocalypse 2002's popular video-game-derived hit
Resident Evil didn't inspire confidence in a sequel, but
Resident Evil: Apocalypse defies odds and surpasses expectations. It's a bigger, better, action-packed zombie thriller, and this time Milla Jovovich (as the first film's no-nonsense heroine) is joined by more characters from the popular Capcom video games, including Jill Valentine (played by British hottie Sienna Guillory) and Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr, from 1999's
The Mummy). They're armed and ready for a high-caliber encounter with devil dogs, mutant "Lickers," lurching zombies, and the leather-clad monster known only as Nemesis, unleashed by the nefarious Umbrella Corporation responsible for creating the cannibalistic undead horde. Having gained valuable experience as a respected second-unit director on high-profile films like
Gladiator and !
The Bourne Identity, director Alexander Witt elevates t! his junk y material to the level of slick, schlocky entertainment.
--Jeff Shannon Resident Evil: Extinction The third installment in the massively popular film series based on Capcom's zombie horror/science fiction games,
Resident Evil: Extinction brings the world to an end, not with a whimper but a bang, as Milla Jovovich's Alice pits her bio-organic superskills against armies of the undead in a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas. Also on hand is a more grown-up version of the games' Claire Redfield (played by
Heroes' Ali Larter), who leads a convoy of humans (among them
Resident Evil vets Oded Fehr and Mike Epps, who reprise their roles as Carlos and LJ, as well as newcomers Ashanti and Spencer Locke) in search of sanctuary; meanwhile, sinister Umbrella Corporation scientist Dr. Sam Isaacs (Iain Glen) seeks a cure for the zombie virus outbreak via Alice's blood, which he taps via a lab full of clones. Subtlety has never been the
Re! sident Evil series' strong suit, but it's hard to argue against
Extinction's breakneck pace and impressive CG special effects; director Russell Mulcahy (the
Highlander series) lends a lot of verve to the proceedings, and the script by producer Paul W.S. Anderson pulls in agreeable touches from
The Road Warrior and
Day of the Dead. A hit during the summer of 2007,
Extinction should please series devotees and action-horror fans alike; the DVD includes commentary by Mulcahy, Anderson, and co-producer Jeremy Bolt, as well as several making-of featurettes, and a glimpse at the next entry in the
Resident Evil franchise, the CG-only
Degeneration.
-- Paul Gaita![]()
