An example of style over substance but certainly not a triumph.

Rating: 5/10 (18 October 2005)

As the sequel is just around the corner I decided to sit down and watch 'Underworld: Special Extended Edition' on DVD and then share my thoughts. Exactly what is so special about this edition is totally beyond me but it did give me an opportunity to address a couple more bugbears.
Slow motion. Slow-mo in action movies has been around a long time and every now and again undergoes a fresh and novel revision by an inspired director. Peckinpah made it an important way of enhancing the emotional impact of violence. John Woo made it an art form which has since been much copied but was never bettered until technology allowed the Warchowski's to take it to wholly new lengths. In it's best incarnations it has been used as a way to enhance the on screen action and draw the audience into a more protracted and intense visual experience. Who can forget the death of Elias in 'Platoon', such an influential moment in cinema it was pretty much the blueprint for the death of Boromir and will be ripped off until Kingdom Come. Then we have the slow-mo in 'Underworld' which appears to be almost exclusively for the purpose of enhancing Kate Beckinsdale's coat (alongside preposterous WHOOSHING sounds). In fact what is it about long black coats in action films theses days? I remember after 'The Hitcher' raincoats were in for at least ten years before the realisation dawned that the novelty had worn off. We seem to be having the same phenomenon now, begun by 'The Matrix', but with PVC/leather instead. Or is it just a goth thing, after all whenever there's a big fight in 'Underworld' you can tell the vampires from the werewolves not by the shaggy fur and big ears (more on this later) but by their long coats! Next for the block is colour grading. All big budget movies these days are colour graded on computers, the process by which individual frames can be altered by having colours faded up or down in the image to create atmosphere or alter the look of a scene. When one colour is brought up above all others the image is said to be colour saturated. This seems to mean that whilst some film makers will use it to enhance their movie (much like the judicious use of slow-mo), others will decide that skilled cinematographers and lighting gaffers are no longer a necessity in their movie because they can just go and fix it all in post production. Enter 'Underworld'. Overblue. Way Overblue. With a bit of green sometimes.
So what's it all about anyway, well I'm sure everyone knows so I'll keep it brief. Werewloves and Vampires are busily conducting their centuries long war when Selene (Kate Beckinsdale), in her stunning PVC cat-suit, stumbles across a Lycan (werewolf clan) plot to kidnap a certain Michael Corvin (Scott 'forgot what he looked like already and it only finished about thirty minutes ago' Speedman) for some bloodline experiments that their leader Lucian (Michael 'Why does an articulate skinny English bearded geek = mysterious to American audiences but = bland drama school type to me' Sheen) is conducting. Selene is a 'Death Dealer'! I groaned aloud when I heard that. It's her job to kill werewolves. Vampires tasked with killing werewolves are called the 'Death Dealers', not the 'Killer Krew' or the 'Ne'er Do Wellers' but the 'Death Dealers'. Dramatic eh? So in the line of duty as a 'Death Dealer' (I'm sorry but I think it's such a ridiculous name I can't stop typing it), killing werewolves in a generic eastern European setting, Selene inadvertently messes up Lucian's plan and Corvin escapes. Throw in some slo-mo coat action and it's all pretty humdrum so far but wait... A Lycan (all of whom up until now have been in human form shooting guns) metamorphosises quite smartly into wolfman form in a subway tunnel and faces down with a vamp, the vampire hisses, the wolf roars, this is it, this is why I watched this film, vampire versus werewolf in a melee, it's gonna be great, the metamorphosis looked cool, the wolf makeup isn't bad, I've seen a lot worse, they go at each other and... we cut away to a train! And therein lies the problem. It promises much but fails to deliver on just about every level.
The characters are mostly bland and forgettable, rounded out by vampire boss Craven (Craven because he's a cowardly baddie you see... brilliant) and Selene's hotty competition in the vampire clan whose name I can't remember but she's English, blonde and posh so obviously evil. I said mostly because the one memorable character is Viktor, played in a totally off the wall fashion by the eccentric Bill Nighy (Phillip from 'Shaun Of The Dead' for you American cousins).
None of these quibbles should really matter if the central tenet of the movie is exploited, ie vamps v werewolves but it isn't. The confrontations are just big generic gunfights between long coated vampires and short coated scruffy Lycans, in which the Lycans do spectacularly badly. They're like the horror movie version of imperial stormtroopers, completely incapable of hitting a barn door at ten dog paces. When you do see a full wolfman in action he huffs, he puffs, and that's about it, he certainly fails to blow the house down. It all eventually thunders, like an asthmatic sixty-two year old Stalingrad grandmother, to an underwhelming climax of bullets and sewers. I suppose the fact that it only took 134 minutes, and not 15 months, to get there is a small blessing.