The most disappointing film I've seen this year

Rating: 3/10 (20 September 2003)

I was really looking forward to this film as I'm a horror fan who likes a more intellectual slant on the oft-ridiculed genre and I saw that Underworld held real potential to be a genre defining film.
However I literally could not have been more disappointed as I left after the film. I was initially stunned to discover that this film lasted about 2 hours because to me it really felt more like 2.45 to 3 hours long. Basically I thought this film was seriously overlong, a problem which blighted most scenes.
There were several story points and character developments that could have been totally explored in one scene that were stretched out to three or four. The story suffered from a lack of narrative, bad pacing and an attempt to stretch a fairly simple and thin plot out and overcomplicate it.
I thought Kate Beckinsale was a strong leading lady and acquited herself very well and of course she looked absolutely fantastic, oozing the threat of violence simmering under the surface with real aristocratic class and measured poise and beauty. However the same could not be said of the other players.
I thought most of the cast believed that if you hunch your shoulders, screw up your forehead and narrow your eyes then you become a menacing presence when I thought they just looked like they had read a particularly large phone bill. The 'Kraven' character was awful, the actor playing him like a one trick pony, see above for his acting technique and was it me or did he say his first line with an American accent before switching to Irish?
It had too many models trying to break into acting sitting about in the vampire mansion, arching their backs and posing relentlessly as they tried to be noticed by the camera whilst the other actors could've faxed in their performances and no one would've noticed the difference.
I thought Len Wiseman's direction was merely competant but as he had co-written the story I feel he maybe couldn't detach himself enough to seperate the wheat from the chaff storywise although he did use a small for Hollywood budget to good effect but this can't make up for the fundamental errors in this project and by the end of the film I didn't care about who would win the conflict as the goals of the different groups had been so poorly defined that it felt like five or six different factions fighting for no reason and no true resolution was defined instead leaving the merest shred for any potential sequels that I hope will never be made. An enormous waste of hype, time and money, absolutely underwhelming and awful.

SPOILER BELOW!

Lastly, when I actually saw how terrible the combined vampire/lycan looked, you can understand why they wanted to keep them apart!