Someone shoot the production designer

Rating: 5/10 (3 October 2003)

Take a dark, gothic world, where vampires have been fighting werewolves (or lychens, as the movie insists on calling them) for hundreds of years and humans are merely bystanders caught in the cross-fire. Throw in the outrageously beautiful Kate Beckinsale dressed in skin-tight PVC, and the potential for spectacular special effects offered by werewolf transformation and vampire/werewolf battles, and surely you have a film that can't fail?
Well, no. Director Wiseman is clearly a fan of genre/comic book movies, but has apparently seen too many of them, as his movie slavishly copies what he liked about these films, and never finds a style of its own. Stylistically it is a blend of The Matrix and Blade, with occasional hints of Batman, and this only serves to highlight the fact that Underworld is not as good as any of these films. (It even directly rips off many shots from The Matrix - check out the aerial shots of rainy streets and down a square stairwell, for example.) The plot is revealed far too slowly, and feels rather muddled, mainly because the minor characters are so one dimensional. It is difficult to tell the lychens from the vampires, let alone the minor vampires from each other. The plot, such as it is, revolves around the lychens attempts to track down a human (Speedman), Michael Corvin, who carries in his blood some unspecified something which will allow the two races to blend, and the attempts of the vampires to stop him.
Along the way Selene (Beckinsale), a vampire warrior dedicated to slaying lychens, and Michael, who has been bitten by a lychen, fall in love. How or why this happens is never made clear, as Beckinsale and Speedman have zero screen chemistry, and the characters never share a moment that leads you to believe that they have bonded emotionally, so it just feels that the only reason that Selene and Michael have a connection is because the plot requires that they should.
A first glance would lead you to think that archetypal english rose Beckinsale would be miscast as a vampire warrior - and you'd be right. She looks the part (although she has inexplicably borrowed her outfit from Trinity in The Matrix), and she handles the guns ok, but she never changes her expression, and she delivers her lines in a manner that suggests she has just wandered in from a Merchant Ivory film being made next door. Shane Brolly's Kraven can't seem to decide which side of the Atlantic he comes from, as his accent is all over the place, and Speedman and Michael Sheen (as Lucien, the lychens' leader) might as well not have turned up for all the imapct they make. Bill Nighy's vampire leader Viktor is rather fun, but not enough to save the film. The fight scenes aren't cool enough, and the final battle is forgettable.
A good idea, that needed 4 things to make a great film
1. A production designer with the talent to give the film a distinctive look of its own.
2. A director who knows how to do action scenes.
3. A witty and coherent script.
4. Cool werewolf morphing special effects.
It has none of these. The end leaves the way open for a sequel, but only those who love Beckinsale in PVC will want to see it.