Kurt Wimmer’s thesis is apparently that Aeon Flux wasn’t nearly loud and stupid enough. Because he’s made more or less the same movie, only with lots more noise and much shorter, and without any oscar-grade actresses. They offered no screenings for critics... now that’s a reliable sign of quality.

The high point of this movie is a sword fight in which the two swords are on fire, in a dark room. And the fact that the plot is set up to create an excuse for this, and yet it’s still largely unexplained where the fire comes from (let alone why they use swords at all!), pretty much tells you all you need to know about what kind of crap they’re making here. The plot is nothing but a sequence of excuses for action set-pieces, and those same action bits, the ones which are supposed to carry the film, are failures on their own terms because they’re so dumb.

Some of those action scenes also feature very poor CGI where they clearly weren’t making the slightest effort to get it right.

Also, this movie has vampires. They try hard not to call them vampires, but that’s what they are. I am really fucking sick of vampires. It’s time for a film moratorium on vampires. (Zombies, you’re next.)

It ain’t based on a comic book, but they pretend it is, by showing fake “Ultraviolet” comic book covers (drawn in different styles and using different languages) in the opening credits.

The high water mark of Wimmer’s career is still Equilibrium, an idiot Matrix ripoff whose key gimmick was taken from The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Update: A decade after this review was first written, Equilibrium has now started acquiring a new reputation as an unfairly neglected forgotten classic. Sorry, it isn’t.