My obsession with the Underworld franchise stems from the summer afternoon where, while dreaming up movie ideas, I came up with a concept for a film about a gang war between vampires and werewolves. The idea was simple enough: take fiction’s two greatest monster creations and pit them against each other in the best tradition of classic gangster films like Public Enemy and White Heat.
It couldn’t have been more than a few weeks later after I’d come up with a rough, short outline, that I read on the Internet that a similar movie was already in production. It was called Underworld, and while it copied my basic idea, the synopsis I read added an interesting kind of “Romeo and Juliet” spin to the concept, recasting the Montagues and Capulets as warring clans of supernatural creatures. I was disappointed, but ultimately approved and awaited the finished movie with great anticipation.
But when the movie was finally unveiled in September 2003, I was less than impressed. Offended is more like it, offended because this was a serviceable concept that should have been foolproof in its execution. As a movie critic, I immediately laid the blame at the feet of director Len Wiseman and screenwriter Danny McBride. I was really surprised by these two; surely Wiseman’s experience in the prop department on Independence Day and McBride’s years as a stuntman would have provided the necessary skills to direct and write a major movie, respectively.
“How could something so simple get so screwed up?”
Now, I have no problem with people looking for upward mobility in their careers. We all want a bigger house, a nicer car, and in Wiseman’s case, a movie star wife, namely Underworld star Kate Beckinsale. But the movie itself left me wanting – wanting a better movie, that is. How could something so simple get so screwed up?
Vampire assassins called “Death Dealers” and werewolf gangs called “Lycans” fight in a seemingly centuries-old conflict, the reasons for which have been forgotten, and everyone is either unwilling or unable to research the past and find out why. Parallels to modern conflicts of race and intolerance? You must be thinking of another movie, because Underworld was all about mindless violence.
Beckinsale as vampire heroine Seline was the best thing to happen to leather cat suits since Diana Riggs saved the day in The Avengers. Her co-star Scott Speedman, however, spent every frame of the movie looking completely and utterly out of his league. He’s supposed to be a capable young surgeon named Michael, but he doesn’t look like he can cure hemorrhoids with Preparation H. I’m not sure what happened to the promised love story, but it was completely nonexistent except for a stolen kiss, and admit it, if you had the chance to lock lips with Kate Beckinsale, you wouldn’t hesitate either.
Whatever plot there was was so overly written and completely contradictory, not to mention convoluted, that all we are left with is bad dialogue, soulless acting and some admittedly pretty cool fight scenes. By the end of the movie, enough loose ends had been tied up that the movie was begging for a sequel. With marginal success at the box office, this request was easily answered with the sequel titled Underworld Evolution.
The sequel more or less picks up where the first one left off, in fact almost exactly where the first one left off. Which is immediately problematic in terms of the logistics of story structure and continuity. I mean, even Jack Bauer gets about a year off between bad days, at least within the chronology of 24.
In part one, two vampire overlords were crossed off the to-do list, there’s one left, and he’s an angry half-bat creature. He ruthlessly pursues Selene and Michael (who is now a vampire/werewolf hybrid), hoping they’ll lead him to his long-lost brother: the first werewolf. The movie pretty much becomes fight scene, fight scene, death trap, fight scene, sex scene, big fight, bigger fight, climactic fight, end.
“Underworld was all about mindless violence.”
The killer part is, given the way the first Underworld was structured, I was so sure that Wiseman and McBride knew where they were going next and what they wanted to do with the story. Obviously, I gave them too much credit. The thing seems to have been put together with a typically childish “it would be cool if it did ‘that'” gusto. Again, this thing does look very cool, but that may just be the whole blue-tinted lighting scheme that I hope Wiseman doesn’t translate to Die Hard 4.
The movie seems perpetually confused. It keeps throwing flashbacks at us to things that were either left out or actually shown in the original, which makes very little sense in the context of Evolution, where almost everything that had to do with the first part is thrown out within the first 20 minutes.
This includes the rather static relationship between Michael and Selene. An open-mouthed kiss and a bite on the neck is apparently all the foreplay they needed to go from first blush to nasty in a filthy warehouse. I don’t mean to be crass, but what’s the timeline here? About a day and a half? In that one, uncomfortable-looking sex scene, you can practically hear Wiseman paraphrasing the Pussycat Dolls by saying, “Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like mine?”
You’d think that more guns, more gore and Kate Beckinsale in the flesh would be enough to give this over-the-top piece of violent gothic melodrama at least one extra star. Sorry to disappoint, but as the old saying goes: “you can’t fill your house with pretty things and expect them to make up for the shoddy construction and poor foundation”. Well, I’m not sure that was an actual saying, but it’s certainly apt.
If a movie is made well enough that, despite bad acting, terrible dialogue, and even cheesy special effects, you’re still fully immersed in its world, then all is forgiven. That’s why the original Star Trek is still considered the best; the stories and characters still hold up, and there is, if the good Spock will forgive me, a logical, emotional and compelling story being told.
In Underworld Evolution, you’re lucky if you have even a vague idea of individual thoughts and motivations as we go from scene to scene. We get hints of something bigger, but it never pays off. We’re told that the characters are too powerful to stop, but they’re eventually defeated with little effort. We have a character who is in charge, in control, a woman of action, but she’s hitched her sail to a man who can’t go five minutes without whining about her predicament.
I’d like to say that there was a point where I was able to put my wandering mind into neutral and just dig on the action sequences and other brick-a-brack, but even I’m not that capable of suspending disbelief that much. And that’s sad. This material has potential, and in the right hands, we could have been treated to one of the most ingenious monster movie mash-ups ever.
But instead, we get this Matrix and Blade hybrid, which, much like Underworld’s hybrids, is nowhere near as provocative or fulfilling as it should be or as it’d like to be. So there just might be some juice left in the idea after all. Call my agent!
