Marginal, at best

Rating: Null/10 (17 October 2003)

Underworld has a few things going for it:
1. Kate Beckinsale is better looking in black latex than the entire cast of The Matrix. 2. The special effects are quite well done for a movie with a fairly low budget such as this. 3. The basic storyline, handled by professional writers and a seasoned director, would make a great movie.
However...
A. You can barely see either 1 or 2, because everything is shot at night with the lights off and the lens cap of the camera on. There is a grand total off one shot of daylight, a rip-off of the lock-the-vampire-in-a-room-with-a-hole-in-the-ceiling-so-they-die-at-dawn scene from Interview with the Vampire. This is the darkest film I've ever scene, and I don't mean in plot or mood-I mean it's like watching a blank screen half the time, with a blur here and there for you to squint at.
B. You know there will be dialogue and chemistry problems when the three credited writers have a grand total of one writing credit between them (an TV episode of the remake of The Outer Limits), and the director is a first timer as well. The plot, if written down on paper in a summary, would look great-but this screenplay needed a freshing up by somebody who knew what they were doing. Kate Beckinsale and Scott Speedman had very little chemistry together, and when they kissed, you could almost hear the writer go, "Well, the movie's half over, so they kiss now," with almost no lead up to this rather important moment.
C. What country is this movie set in? It looks like Eastern Europe somewhere (since it was filmed in Hungary, this makes sense), but all the characters speak English and all the signs are in English (and the character's accents are all over the planet). It's clearly not America, because the cop car looks European too, with a long European style license plate (with no country listed on it, of course). The movie is set in Movieland.
D. There are a grand total of *two* humans that have speaking lines (Micheal Corvin and his coworker at the hospital). What's worse, other than the crowded subway station at the beginning of the film, there aren't even any human extras-the (very dark) streets are totally deserted-except, again, in the opening scene, where they are very crowded, because the plot demands it. When a group of werewolves tear up an apartment building (the one Michael lives in), followed by Selene shooting a bunch of holes in the floor (the scene in the trailer), you would think the commotion would cause somebody to scream or call the cops or SOMETHING. There haven't been streets this deserted in an action film since The Avengers movie with Uma "Will Kill Bill" Thurman. Combine C and D, and you get a strong unpleasant sense of artificiality.