Vampires for the 21st Century, but there's not an awful lot going on here besides this.

Rating: 5/10 (28 March 2009)

Underworld is the horror film for the YouTube generation. It presents two of Universal's many classical horror monsters from yester-decade and updates them for the contemporary age that is the 21st Century. Similary to the following year's Van Helsing and to quite some similar failings, Underworld presents vampires and werewolves, not as subjects of horror designed to frighten, but as action heroes fighting one another in a picture that is more akin to a war film than it is most anything else. The hybridity of the genres and general updating does not stop there, for at its centre is a strong female hero, a bringing into the 21st century for both species and an essence of noir for good measure.
The most interesting thing about Underworld is its study of post-modern (indeed, post-classical) vampires and how now, they are all techno-literate beings whom dress in the latest fashion and carry on with a certain legacy of looking smart and always trying to remain one-up on their enemies. While all around contemporary Hollywood over the last few years, different directors explore their chosen 'types' of vampires, Len Wiseman purely updates and shifts into the 21st Century. Some examples I'm thinking of are Robert Rodriguez' Hispanic vampires in From Dusk Till Dawn; the African-American half-vampire lead in the Blade films and a more obscure example in 2001 film The Forsaken, in which you had to believe a group of relatively harmless looking bunch of teen vampires were on the brink of world domination. These ideas have continued on with films like Twilight, which places a romantic spin on the character.
Wiseman has taken what it was for a character to be a vampire and has purely transformed them for now: cloaks into PVC, Gothic bookcases and books into laptops and computers and has gifted them with an array of firearms. On the other hand, the werewolves or 'lycans' in this film are grotty and dirty. They inhabit grungy and filthy locations and seem to have none of the advanced ways of living their counterparts have, if the vampires are sexy then the Lycans are just plain ugly. They are additionally evil and sadistic in their procedures, taking blood from people that really don't want to be there.
Underworld takes place in an odd Eastern European/United States hybrid of a location and sees its female lead, named Selene (Beckinsale), go through a number of motions before she comes across a certain human named Michael Corvin (Speedman), someone whom the Lycans have targeted as part of their plans. Following Michael being bitten and Selene's determination to save him, a love story begins to bloom. The love story between two rivalling factions makes me think of Romeo and Juliet, but in another one of Wiseman's twisting of classical conventions, one agent of the party is a member of the 'enemy' against his will.
Alas, all the glory within this film lies in its ideas and its here we remember that the film is a bit of a dead zone, offering murky and somewhat camp entertainment (especially when Bill Nighy turns up) at the best of times. Wiseman has a strong, female lead at the centre of his film but the director conflicts his interests in the shooting of her, that being he does so in a manner in which she's rendered an object. Underworld begins in a relatively ominous fashion with the set up to do with the Lycans trying to find a descendant of a certain someone and the fact they've developed a weapon that can kill vampires a lot more efficiently than anything else that has previously been produced.
The film is quite good fun for about thirty-five minutes, then the charm wears off; then we recognise the all updating of the vampire conventions, etc. and get tired of it; and then it just descends into nothing before it ends. What was quite good very quickly becomes ugly looking characters standing around explaining the plot to one another when they aren't merely grumbling their lines amidst bleak and tired looking locations. The vampires spend their spare time shooting statues in the large, Gothic manor house they inhabit purely for target practise but what happens when they decapitate all their statues? They look stern and talk in gruff and ominous tones as their leader, Viktor (Nighy), who is awoken for certain reasons, slobbers and cackles all over the place in a role that on another day you might think was a pantomime performance.
What about the Lycans? Well, one Lycan towards the end can seemingly turn into a werewolf and back again at will, despite there not being any obvious evidence of a full moon and whenever they do come up against someone they don't like, they maul them in a series of close up shots of blood, biting and shards being extracted from bodies that are just grotesque and feel oddly out of place in what is a casual, '15' certificate, gloomy period drama for most of the time. I read that Wiseman did a lot of concept art and drawing for the film – it shows. What also shows is his lack of attention to everything else. He's caught the 'look' of the vampires and the cinematography is relatively good but the film's running on empty. It makes me think: what else can a film about warring vampires and werewolves be about? Well, probably not much which further begs the question 'why even bother in the first place.'