To coin a trite phrase that movie reviewers often use, 'how do I get that 45 minutes of my life back?',  seriously I'd like to know. That's right, 45 minutes is all I managed to watch of this techno babble-bad CGI-ass fest, and I sat through ALL of Batman & Robin.

First some background to this movie: Kurt Wimmer had written and adpated a couple of things for Hollywood, but nothing major. Then he made a (relatively) low budget sci-fi/1984 rip-off, called 'Equilibrium', starring Christian Bale. The movie had a small release, but grew in popularity through the DVD market. Equilibrium was a solid film, it looked beautiful, the plot was interesting, the lead characters were engaging and the world in which it was set was nicely realised. It also had some nice little touches like 'Gun-kata'; a martial art practiced by the lead characters, performed with their guns in hand. So when it came to lay down some beatings there was a wicked mix of martial arts and shooting people in the face. I enjoyed it.

So, what happened? Did Wimmer get lucky with 'Equilibrium'? I sat down last night, having tried to ignore the 'negative buzz' surrounding the film, focused on clearing my mind and being un-biased. Ten minutes in and I was a drooling Jack Nicholson at the end of 'One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest'. Why? Because this movie gave me brain-diabetes.

From what I remember the back story is; it's in the future, the humans try to create super-soldiers using gene-splicing or some crap, the disease gets out, it spreads, the infected people are rounded up and killed, or some are put in camps, then killed, and some escape (I think), the infected are called heebyjeebies (this isn't the name, but they're basically fancy vampires) and now the vampires are fighting back against the humans. So this movie is already off to a crappy start. That back-story is explained to the audience in a 10 second voice over. I had to rewind twice to take it in and even then it doesn't make any sense. Who exactly are the vampires fighting? What is their ultimate goal? To defeat the government I'm guessing… But by now I already don't care.

Milla Jovovich takes the lead role as 'Violet Song jat Shariff'. I swear that's her name, you couldn't make that up. Milla is a decent actress, but adding this to a crap pile already containing the Resident Evil movies, she's positioning herself on a slippery slope leading to films starring one of Patrick Swayze's brothers. Every other actor in this movie looks like they've wandered onto set and forgotten what they're doing there.

The beginning 20 minutes of the film is used to establish 'the plot'. This basically revolves around Violet smuggling herself into some secure science place posing as a courier and then stealing an un-named 'weapon'. After a lot of vacuous fight scenes and pointless chase sequences, Jovovich gets the weapon back to someone we presume is the head of the vampires. It turns out the weapon is actually a child whose blood is being experimented with to make a disease capable of wiping out all the vamps (I may well have gotten this wrong, but well… I don't care). Long story short Violet goes rogue with the child in tow and gets into some more fights. This time with a bunch of stupid Chinese guys on a rooftop. At this point it was all getting too much so I turned it off and decided to sell the DVD on Ebay.

The film also has a really strange 'soft-focus'-quality, which I suppose is an attempt to make it seem like the future, but ended up just making it look like cut scenes from a low budget computer game. The CGI is cheap and crap, why try to do sprawling wide-angle shots of a futuristic city, when the money would have been better off spent on cereal for the crew. In addition the film rips off numerous elements from other, much better films; costume-changing from the Matrix, vampires' light blocking suits from Blade 2, smashing pavement when you land on it from Blade and numerous other bits and pieces.

Ultraviolet is shit. The plot is so tied up with explaining itself to itself and setting up fight scenes for Violet, that it forgets to let us, the audience, in on what's going on. It falls into the same trap as the 2nd and 3rd Matrix films, trying to cover the obvious holes in the plot, by using techno babble and riddles, laying it on thick between set pieces, fight scenes and motorbike chases. Ultimately some of the fight scenes are enjoyable, but it isn't even remotely enough to sustain the audience through the cruddy plot, terrible acting and pointless set pieces.

If you have the choice between watching this and television static, I would choose the static every time.