wants to be great, settles for mediocre

Rating: 5/10 (30 June 2005)

With its leather-wearing heroine and eternal, blue-filtered night, it's obvious that Underwold is desperate to be cool. Sadly, desperate and cool never go together. Cool movies are those where the director wants to say something in an interesting way, and is enamored of a certain slick style. It's not that cool movies aren't consciously cool, but that they are interested in more than just being cool. In the Matrix the directors were desperate to be profound and say something about the human condition, whereas Tarentino's films are informed by his desire to keep himself amused. Not that I'm a fan of Tarentino by any means, but in his glib way he does have a sense of cool.
But Underworld is just an empty vehicle for slick posturing. It's not just that the movie has nothing profound to say (The Matrix only wanted to be profound, it didn't actually succeed), it's that the movie has nothing to say at all. It exists entirely as a vehicle for the lovely and talented Kate Beckinsale to posture and snarl some forgettable dialog. Even the film's somewhat interesting revelation in the last quarter feels not like a result of deep conviction but simply like something clever the script could toss in.
While the movie is weak in almost everything, it has a workmanlike competence that keeps it watchable. You never connect with the characters, you are never enthralled by the story and the fight scenes aren't especially good, but nothing is really bad enough to stop watching, and the movie is a perfectly acceptable way to kill a couple of hours.
But what it is not is cool.