Well, went and treated myself to the movie ‘Ultraviolet’ this evening.

If you’re looking for live-action anime with modern Hollywood sterilized violence and a high “Nifty, neato, gee whiz!” factor, then you’ll probably like this movie.

If you’re looking for another ‘Equilibrium’, you’re going to be disappointed.

‘Equilibrium’ is one of my all time favorite movies, so you can guess where I fall on that spectrum.

I’m afraid that Kurt Wimmer is going to be one of these people that does his best work with a skeleton budget, but if you give him some money, he just goes to hell.

The special effects in ‘Ultraviolet’ were very neat. The CG effects were almost subtle, and the colour-changing hair and outfits well done; and the multi-dimensional storage added a nice touch of “Wow.”

Many, many OPFOR red shirts bit the dust — amid several mines worth of flying lead — the Head Bad Guy In Charge was sleazy and died, there were some memorable one-liners which will be showing up in .sig lines for the next couple of months, and the whole thing was set in a future Dystopia.

Oh, speaking of signatures, there was some of Wimmer’s Gun Kata here and there.

It just isn’t on the same level as ‘Equilibrium’. Mr. Wimmers’ first movie was many things: a story of a man learning to feel; an unsubtle dig at Big Government and the Nanny State; making choices; being human, and doing The Right Thing.

Some of the scenes where Cleric Preston is dealing with the completely unknown world of feelings are powerful: as he guiltily removes his glove to to touch a stair rail that a stranger had just touched, the terror when he realizes that he is enjoying a sunrise, the sense of loss when he hears Beethoven for the first time, all good stuff.

Punctuated by Bad Guys getting their butts kicked. And in the Climatic Final Meeting where Preston whacks the Chief Bad Guy, you’re rooting for Preston and it’s righteous when he whacks the Bad Guy.

In ‘Ultraviolet’, we just have Violet whacking and stacking Bad Guys. At the end, we’re rooting for Violet simply because she has a nice butt. Oh, she killed the Chief Bad Dude? Cool.

*sigh*

Also, I will have to admit that I was very disappointed not to see the ‘trapping/sticky hands’ close-in version of Gun Kata in ‘Ultraviolet’. That, my friends, is wizard gun work. Pity Mr. Wimmer chose not to use it in his latest movie.

LawDog