Underworld (2003)

It almost beggars belief that a film featuring Kate Beckinsale in a tight-fitting PVC catsuit could be this tedious. Former production designer turned first-time director Len Wiseman understandably has a good eye for visuals but seems to have no clue whatsoever what constitutes good drama or even coherent story-telling.

Underworld – pre-sold as a supernatural Romeo and Juliet but in truth more like a watered-down The Matrix (1999) wannabe – had plenty of potential, very little of which is realised on the screen. Lifting elements from The Matrix, Blade (1998) and The Crow (1994), it mixes up every cliche known to Hollywood and has absolutely nothing new to say. It opens badly, with a clumsily staged action sequence in a crowded subway station in which Beckinsale’s Death Dealer – a moody vampire assassin – leads an attack on a group of Lycans, werewolves with the ability to change appearance at will. The battle is fought with those peculiar guns available only in Hollywood, the ones that can be recklessly fired in a packed, confined space and the only people to be hit will be those who are required to suffer in order to advance the plot – in his review at Film Freak Central, Walter Chaw sums up the firefight by noting that it succeeds only in “demonstrating the vamps’ and Lycans’ amazing marksmanship in only causing one bystander casualty while simultaneously demonstrating their amazing lack of marksmanship in their managing to fire ten-thousand bullets into walls minding their own business .”

Not that we’d really care all that much if anyone was shot and killed in a film full of emotionless ciphers whose sketchy back-stories are given brief time in the limelight only when scriptwriters feel the need for some “character development,” though in truth there’s precious little of that. With so little to work with, it’s hardly surprising that the performances are so bad – Beckinsale looks fantastic but whatever her other talents may be, playing a hard-nosed action heroine isn’t one of them. Worse still are Scott Speedman (who sleepwalks his way through the thankless role of Beckinsale’s on-screen love interest), Michael Sheen (who make no impact whatsoever as werewolf leader Lucien) and, pick of a very bad crop, Shane Brolly, who is simply unspeakable as the snarling vampire Kraven. Only the ever wonderful Bill Nighy manages to emerge from it all with some dignity intact.

The trailer for Underworld and a lot of the advance publicity suggested that it was going to be an all-action gun-fest, which may have been predictable but might at least have been watchable. The reality is somewhat different – after the opening shoot-out the film gets bogged down in the internecine politics of the vampire/werewolf war and the internal bickerings in the vampire camp. All of the action scenes are there in the trailer which gives no hint of just how tedious the rest of the film is going to be. Wiseman clearly still has much to learn about pace and rhythm and certainly in future would be well advised not to start his films with an explosive action sequence without having something interesting to follow through with. Whenever the plot does get going, it becomes clear that the writers were getting bogged down in their own cleverness, not bothering to explain many of the details or even give the film a sense of time and place – combined with the paucity of an human characters, it results in a film that positively works against an audience warming to it.

It’s not clear who the writers thought they were aiming their film at – horror fans would have been disappointed by the lack of supernatural elements and by the simple fact that neither the vampires nor the werewolves are in the remotest bit scary. It speaks volumes that the war between these two supernatural races are fought with such mundane weapons as guns and grenades. Far from being a powerful menace, the vampires and werewolves are just another pair of Hollywood gangs slugging it out to a noisy pseudo-industrial soundtrack.

This would have been forgivable if the film had been even remotely interesting – with a dull heroine at its core, gloomy settings and barely a trace of humour, it’s hard going and half an hour in, it’s impossible to keep up any real interest in what’s going on. Instead one tends to get sidetracked by the details that the writers seem to have ignored – why do vampires now cast reflections in mirrors? Why do Beckinsale’s guns never run out ammunition? Why do the werewolves run along the walls rather than doing the sensible thing like running along a perfectly good floor? And what does Selene see in the dreary Corvin to make her fall in love with him so easily?

Underworld was just the start of a particularly dreary franchise that rumbled on until 2016 – and as of early 2018 there’s the threat of a sixth episode and even a television series. This first effort is notionally the best – which tells you all you need to know about the terrible quality of what followed.