Underwold Underwhelms

When Selene, played with sexy panache by Kate Beckinsale, uttered the words “The war had all but ground to a halt in the blink of an eye.” Whispered in her full-mouthed British pout she flung herself off the precipice of an indescribably tall tower and she dropped into a dark rainy night descending what seemed like hundreds of feet to the earth below. So began one of the most memorable opening scenes of movie making in the last decade-and-a-half. A sequence so startling it stays in your mind like the site of that massive Star Destroyer obliterating the screen chasing Princess Lea’s shuttle at the beginning of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

Under the helm of writer Kevin Grevioux and director Len Wisemen, Underworld transformed our imaginations and began a new zeitgeist for vampires and werewolves while turning Ms. Beckinsale into a slinking action star. In that original movie you had intrigue, scandal and sex constricted by violence into a serpentine plot. It was a bloody and glamorous melodrama funneled through the mind of Len Wiseman as if he were Douglas Sirk making a vampire movie. Seriously. Unfortunately that was 9-years and two movies ago and now the franchise has devolved into a derivative version of its former glory.

The movie starts off with Selene—Ms. Beckinsale reprising her role after missing the third installment, the vampire Death Dealer, as she and her beloved Michael, the only human-vampire-werewolf hybrid to ever exist, try to escape capture at the hands of humanity. The Vampire-Lycan (werewolf) war has been exposed and humans are out en masse searching for all non-humans and destroying them, erroneously thinking vampirism and werewolfism were some kind of disease or plague. Selene and Michael are captured. Fast forward a dozen years later and the first of many sci-fi staple rip-offs begins. Selene is in no better mood waking up confused than Sigourney Weaver's cloned Ripely in Aliens: Resurrection. In this future vampires and werewolves are all but extinct. Hidden in the bowels of a genetic laboratory run by Dr. Jacob Lane (Stephen Rea) is the secret to mankind’s salvation from monsters. Or so mankind has been told. Its seems that a mysterious young girl named Eve (India Eisely) --who by the way is this movie's Newt--holds the key to the Vampire’s salvation and Selene must protect her at all cost.

Directors Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein have created a reductive stew that blends the major uhs and ahs of special effect and wire-work wizardry with none of the original movie's excitement or innovation. They blow their wads in the first action sequence (actually the second sequence but the many in this movie are so tedious they start looking and feeling a like) when we see Selene breaking out of the genetic's lab. A well meaning Detective Sebastian has the case of finding the culprits who caused the destruction and subsequent murders of several people dropped into his lap. He knows that vampires still exist even though they remain hidden from view. A young vampire warrior named David comes to Selene's aid. He wants to return the vampiric covens to their former glories as masters of the world but his father is conflicted. Selene is tasked with protecting young Eve no matter what and soon the Lycans make a decidedly massive comeback and all sorts of ill-time gory shenanigans follow.

Underworld: Awakening is a beautiful movie to watch. Sweeping atmospheric eastern European landscapes, brooding rain, industrial and austere looking buildings give the movie a sense that it is about to implode and collapse in on you. The special effects are more CGI related in this one but all of it is a retread of the 3 previous movies. Ms. Beckinsale delivers on her sexy violence. She plays Selene straightforward. She tries to bring a certain freshness, urgency and emotional range to a character she's playing for the third time. I appreciate that but at the end of the day its still a hot girl with a milky completion, un-dialated colored contacts with fangs and an automatic weapon. There's only but so much that can be done that hasn't been in her 2 previous iterations of this character. Michael Ealy who plays the haunted detective (his wife died of the plague) looks equally as good given his flaccid character's dialogue. He's a by-the-numbers sidekick, torn between what's his duty and what's right. He goes through the movie with his signature frown-pout that is his all-purpose emotion when he's given nothing to work with. There are a few staid sub-plots between David (Theo James) and his father. Interestingly enough the only real emotion or fun I feel comes from the older actors: Stephen Rea and Charles Dance who plays Thomas, David's vampire father. Mr. Rea takes his character at face value. This gives his performance some heft but it doesn't come across as pretentious.

I was surprised at the dull and fallow script. Mr. Wiseman who wrote the story has been with this franchise since the first movie and should have been savvy enough to know what his legion of fans want to see. And if not the Hugo winning J. Michael Straczynski, the creator and writer behind Babylon 5, should have known how to produce strong character driven movies with powerful narratives. He did it for 5-years on one of Sci-Fi's greatest soap operas. What spoiled Underworld: Awakening was a lack of imagination. The filmmakers didn't think they needed to propel characters into new directions. They thought we lacked that imagination to follow them in new directions. Ultimately this made for an ending that begged for a sequel and that angered me. I must say this last instalement of Underworld indeed has awaken me and I won't be following this franchise into another darkened theater again.