And anyway, where do they earn the money?

Rating: Null/10 (10 January 2006)

This one of the messiest movies I've seen in a while. It's rare to see the proof of a first-time director so visibly on the screen, just by the way the mistakes line up as the film progresses.
The basic idea of Werewolves vs. Vampires is all there really is, because as complicated as the plot pretends to be, it just is badly coordinated. For much of the film the movie wants us to see the vampires as the good guys and the werewolves as the bad ones, than vice versa and finally there is no idea of who is what and why and why not.
On a certain level the movie almost works, if just because it tries so hard. Everything is done with full intensity, which unfortunately is the movie's biggest flaw, because there is no coherency at all. The opening shootout in the subway is so blatantly ripped off from the same scene in "The Matrix" (1999) that you start looking where the differences are. The fight scenes are done with so much help of wires and slow-motion that they might as well have saved the cost for post-wire removal and could just show the actual footage of the scenes, because the tricks are so obvious anyway. The werewolves never look that convincing, neither in the make-up nor as CGI and to give us only two actual transformations is pretty poor for a werewolf-movie, especially if it's the exact same transformation of the same character, just put in the beginning and the end of the movie so that maybe no one will notice.
The whole "You-betrayed-them-betrayed-me-avenge-you-reign-now-be-immortal"-plot is so irritating that I gave up following it early on because the movie does not rely on it at all. All it does is slow the movie down, so that our heroine Selene can return to the vampire mansion and escape from it for about five times; so that the poor hero Michael can be captured, released, rescued, tied up and hunted over and over again without ever having a clue what is going on; so that the (admittably great) Bill Nighy can be a vampire lord and sit in a dark room holding monologues while we can witness the slowest awakening and regeneration ever captured on film. What does the blonde lady really want? What do the two leaders of each group actually want? We never get real answers, just more and more complications and an endless repetitions of names, until we are sick of hearing Viktor, Michael, Markus, Lucian and Kraven again and again like an indoctrination.
The locations throughout the movie consist of the vampire mansion, the werewolf underground and the small Eastern Europe city streets where the movie was shot, everything photographed in gray and black, with rain pouring down constantly. Except for the opening scene there are basically no humans visible in that big city, which makes sense with all the monsters shooting at each other, so much in fact that even daylight seems to have decided to stay at home. Above all this there is a score which consists of two elements: electro-noise and ripoff-Matrix-score. Sometimes I wondered if the sound was broken or something, until I realized that it was the "music".
All leads up to the most incoherent, chaotic and silliest showdown I have seen in a while. For about 30 minutes we are captured in some underground location (which isn't that fascinating in the first place) and witness an endless variation of 3 scenes that are edited together without any sense of logic, orientation or suspense: people running stairs up or down; people hiding behind walls watching other people running by; people shooting at each other and getting shot. I do not believe that anyone in this basement has any clue where he (there is only one she) is going and what he is doing when he gets there. So they run and they shoot and they run by and they hide and up and down and so on. There are some hand to hand fights which, curiously enough, often end with a werewolf head coming very close to the camera, without ever showing a werewolf actually bite of a vampire's head, which seems to be what they are doing.
The climax is so weak in its resolution that you actually wait for more to happen, because it's hard to believe that this is it. The whole movie is building up for something happening to Michael and when it finally does, you somehow expect more than a black Hulk.
I am not looking forward to the sequel of this, except when it manages to answer some of the questions that continued to occur to me while watching this jumbled mess. - When exactly do werewolves die? Some seem to fall dead even by the hint of a bullet and some don't seem to be able to die no matter how much silver they have pumping in their veins. - How easy is it to hide a really big sword in your clothes and pull it out whenever necessary? - Why aren't the only two African-American actors allowed to speak normally? The black vampire sounds as if he has problems with those long teeth in his mouth, while the black werewolf seems to have a really sore throat. - Who puts up the marble statues that are used for shooting practice at the vampire mansion? - Why does glass burst under 10 feet of water, when the last time I saw something similar in a movie it was in "The Abyss" where they had to go significantly deeper to have glass burst like that? - Isn't a big, long, wide cape pretty annoying when you never fly but just run and jump around a lot? - Does vampire and werewolf blood function like a normal color wheel, where you just get black when you mix it all together?