Big guns, big blades, Big Brother regimes, martial arts, deafening noise, and headache-inducing visuals: welcome back to the world of Equilibrium director Kurt Wimmer.

Here, reigning action queen Milla Jovovich replaces Christian Bale as the pirouetting death-dealer who rages against the totalitarian machine.

She is Violet, a key foot-soldier in a future 'Blood War' between those infected with a nasty virus (vampire-like 'haemophages' like Violet) and the paranoid, oppressive government.

We join her as she infiltrates a high-security installation to steal the weapon that will end all the bad blood. The kill-or-cure-all turns out to be a boy called Six (Bright, whose genes were also sought after in X-Men: The Last Stand).

The top haemophage wants the boy dead, but Violet won't allow it and takes off. Sneering government boss Vice Cardinal Daxus (Chinlund) also wants his baby back.

(If he's the vice cardinal, who's the cardinal? And why does he have those ring-pulls stuck up his nose?)

"What am I doing?" Violet asks herself on more than one occasion. And so will you as she dithers between running away from and confronting Daxus and his legions of armed goons.

Despite all the slicing up and gunning down, Ultraviolet is aimed at those of an actual or reading age of under 15 and is therefore mostly bloodless. It's also mindless, humourless and soulless.

Surprising, too, how quickly one tires of the high-definition visuals and overwhelming special effects when the story is as flat as Milla's midriff.

Wimmer, though, never tires of having the former Revlon model advance towards the camera in sunglasses, Spandex and slo-mo. His film looks like a Revlon ad as channelled though an X-Box.

The opening credits suggest that Ultraviolet is based on a comic-book. But Wimmer says he got the idea from John Cassavetes' chase thriller Gloria.

Poor old John Cassavetes - even he doesn't get to rest in peace.

Elliott Noble