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Underworld (2003)
Underworld is an action/monster movie that features the very odd casting of Kate Beckinsale as an ass kicking vampire warrior. The pixie-ish Beckinsale would seem the last person you'd think of in such a role. She is gorgeous but hasn't shown much personality on screen so far. That is coincidently an almost perfect description of Underworld.
The movie is simply gorgeous to look at. It is shot entirely at night and features heavily washed out colors leaning towards blue. It's so washed out it comes close to being black and white. But the grim look of the film is perfect for telling the story of a war between vampires and werewolves, two creatures of the night. Add magnificent work in costuming to that and you have a movie that seems to always have something intriguing on screen to please the eye. Beckinsale herself is often that pleasing thing. Her face seems perfectly designed for the movies, with big beautiful eyes, a tiny nose and luscious lips. The director clearly understands this and thus we have many many shots of her face, framed by dark hair almost always set to hide one eye, that linger lovingly. From a visual standpoint, Underworld is a great movie. Unfortunately, the story, dialogue and acting factor into the equation as well and they do not meet the same standards.
Beckinsale plays Selene, a vampire Death Dealer, an elite warrior if you will. Her job is to hunt down and kill Lycans, or werewolves to the rest of us. As the movie opens, she and her team are hunting werewolves, who happen to be on the tail of a particular human. This leads to an extended gun battle, during which I had a hard time keeping track of who most of the people were supposed to be. The battle is pretty much a draw, with dead on both sides, but Selene captures a werewolf handgun loaded with bullets full of a chemical which produces UV light. In other words, a bullet custom designed to kill vampires. She brings this back to her coven, where her leader Kraven is less than impressed. He's more concerned with a party they are throwing for some visiting vampires.
Selene eventually tracks down the human Michael (Scott Speedman) who the werewolves were so intent on capturing. He has no idea why they want him and is generally baffled by the whole affair. So is the audience. There are mysteries to the entire vampire/werewolf war and the movie grudgingly coughs up clues. I'll tell you right now that you shouldn't expend much energy trying to figure it out. It's all eventually explained in great detail but it doesn't really help because it comes so late in the movie that we've long since stopped caring.
Why don't we care? First off, there are virtually no humans in this movie. So we're left to choose between two groups, both of which are traditionally villains, to root for. The script does not help this by leaving the entire affair very grey. There are few moments where it seems clear who is our preferred victor in this struggle. The nature of movies puts Selene front and center as our hero but she herself seems highly conflicted on what to do. So as the movie progresses, we waffle in our loyalties until practically the end of the movie. By that point the ending we're given combined with the preceding flip-flopping has led to almost certain ambivalence.
Adding to this confusion is a refusal by the movie to set and play by rules. The long standing mythology of vampires and werewolves gives us certain expectations for how they behave and what can hurt them. The movie ignores some of that and uses other parts, with great inconsistency. Just what hurts both groups is ill defined. The strength of these groups is also poorly explained and is not consistent through out the movie. Basically, it seems that vampires and werewolves are as weak or powerful as the script requires for any given scene. The failure to set rules and then play by them makes it hard to follow along and in any way give a rat's ass about the proceedings.
Acting. There really isn't much of it in this movie. Scott Speedman gets second billing and has a character so thin you have to think very hard to remember if he has any actual lines. Kate Beckinsale's performance is the biggest in terms of screen time but she does nothing with it in terms of character development. Admittedly the script gives her nothing to work with but if she wasn't so attractive I'd have a hard time remembering her presence in the movie. At this point I'd have to say this is all she has to offer. Along with this film, Pearl Harbor, Serendipity and Laurel Canyon, she's shown she has movie star looks and no chops. There isn't much to mention in terms of acting in this film except that Michael Sheen has one nice scene where he talks about the death of his wife. It's nicely done with the emotions playing across his face as he tells his ancient tale. That's the movie's acting highlight right there.
This is a movie that looks great and doesn't have an ounce of substance to it. It has no real characters, very little dialogue and only a flimsy framework of a story. It exists as great sets and costumes, big flashy battles and special effects, all with no reason to exist or care about it. The sad thing is that the ending is left wide open for a sequel. Since this film didn't have enough ideas to sustain one movie, I'm scared to think how flimsy a second one would be.
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