Not great, but gets a few things right

Rating: 5/10 (12 June 2020)

I was already starting on a bad note with Underworld, because I've never been a fan of occult creatures and magical monsters. Sitting down to a movie about a vampire who hunts down werewolves instantly turns me off. It began to win me back, though, because it has a noir vibe to the beginning, and Kate Beckinsale's character is like a detective in some ways. While I don't love the grayed-out color palette of the film, if they were aiming for this kind of neo-noir feeling, then it would be fitting. Where it falls apart is that it blends a bunch of Matrix-style action into a movie that was already trying to juggle two wildly different genres. It just becomes noise and chaos, and ruins any sense of drama or excitement when there are guns blazing constantly.
The one thing I do kind of appreciate about most vampire or werewolf movies is that they establish some rules about how one of these creatures is injured or killed. Yet, in Underworld they make those rules fuzzy and confusing. Sometimes the creatures are knocked down by a few magic bullets, other times they can take a million without batting an eye (which then begs the question, why are guns the chosen weapons for either of them?) I found the entire plot to be a bit convoluted and at times stupid. There were some decent casting decisions in the movie, even if it was a bit obvious where certain loyalties lied when I saw actors that tend to get thrown into the same kind of roles in every film.
My biggest question as Underworld got going was "why are the vampires the good guys in this scenario?" I kept wondering this, because both are dangerous creatures and we have no reason to take a side other than our protagonist is a vampire so her people must be the heroes. But I have to commend them, because they did address this later on in some fashion. I'll say no more, but at least they didn't completely drop the ball on motivations and explaining why we should care. So, while there wasn't much I enjoyed about Underworld, I did give it a slightly higher rating because they handled the storytelling a bit better than I had anticipated. It might not have been my kind of film, but at least it wasn't a total waste of time.