Guilty pleasures

OK, I have to 'fess up. Well, no, I don't have to 'fess up, but I'm gonna.

I have no rational explanation for this, but I really enjoy the movie Ultraviolet, which crashed and burned at the box office but came out on DVD this week. I had Netflix send it right away.

My first take on the film after seeing it in the theater was that it was a muddled mess. I can't decide if they were going for stylized visuals or if they just had no money for special effects, but in the action scenes Milla Jovovich seems to be moving in and out of cartoon land like a reverse Roger Rabbit. The body count easily breaks the record set in Hot Shots Part Deux. Some of the fight scenes are so chaotic you can't figure out what's happening, the dialogue is stale and overly predictable (the conversation in the final showdown with the baddie borders on Dudley DoRight-Snidley Whiplash awful), and well, Milla won't be winning any acting awards for this.

So why did I go back to see the DVD the first week it was available?

Part of it, I swear, was to see if the film makes any more sense in the seven-minute extended version. And it does. There seems to be more exposition than I remember, and this movie badly needed exposition.

But, just as Jovovich's LeeLoo is the only thing that I remember about The Fifth Element, I'm afraid the main attraction of Ultraviolet is Milla's attractive belly, which is in just about every scene. And that seems to be what separates Ultraviolet from the "one viewing was enough, thank you" crowd.

Damn those hormones anyway.