It's just not sexy or funny enough.

Rating: Null/10 (14 January 2006)

Great premise - the Werewolves and the Vampires in a centuries long gang war and it looks like they threw buckets of money at the screen - but it just ended up a confusing mess, a long, very violent confusing mess. Half of the movie took place in tunnels with two sets of people in black shooting vast amounts of various coloured bullets at each other. After a while I didn't care who was shooting at whom or why, After another while it just became boring; it was like watching someone else play a shoot 'em up and realising they weren't going to let you have a go until he'd finished every level. Like a game, every now and then there is a cut scene in which characters reveal chunks of back-story to each other - then off we go again... Blam! Blam! Blam!
There was no humour in this movie and it needed it. There is nothing but nothing to give any contrast to the dark and snarling. Everyone in this movie snarls their lines - Shane Brolly as Kraven is particularly awful - though later in the movie Michael Sheen (Lucian the head Werewolf) does get to do some non-snarly acting when he reveals yet more back story about how the war really started and, for a (very brief) moment, we see what a really great movie this might have been. With a bit of compassion and wit and the actors allowed to act and not just leap about posing for the covers of old Marvel comic this could have really been a stand-out film. As it is it looks like a compendium of all the flashy bits of Farscape, The Matrix, various Alien movies, Blade... etc etc.
Wherever they shot it looks great. Though the relentless rain gets tedious after a while - curiously the second time Selene goes to the Interogation place to rescue Michael it isn't raining outside when she draws up in the car but it is raining INSIDE the building. This is either a very weird joke or a continuity error.
And I'm sorry to say though Kate Beckinsale is interesting as the ice-cold vampire killer she just wasn't sexy enough even with all the rubber and leather and the corsets. That's the whole point about Vampires, they are supposed to be sexy - this lot weren't.