Underworld: Underwhelming

Rating: 4/10 (29 September 2003)

Great idea, bad execution. I was hoping for an epic war between the two of the most famous Hollywood monsters, with a strong dose of Matrix inspired style. What I got was an anemic, pretentious, "action" flick that hasn't a spark of originality or life.
The plot is pure action movie fodder, but provides us with only two weak action scenes; one at the beginning and one at the end; with a whole lot of boring material in between delivered by the least talented and least charismatic cast in recent memory. It fails to evoke any notions of an epic or ancient war. Worst of all is Underworld's vain pretentiousness. This is a silly vampire action movie and the filmmakers don't seem to know it, and they present it like it's freakin' high art.
At least the action scenes were cool, right? Right? Wrong! Dead wrong (pun intended)! I'm really sad to see the once cool akimbo pistol style (using two pistols at once) made popular by John Woo's Hong Kong masterpieces, then brought to America in Face/Off and the Matrix, go all mainstream. It's so cliché these days that you even see it used on crappy TV shows. If John Woo where dead, he'd be rolling over in his grave. And Underworld puts the last nail in the coffin on akimbo pistols, no intelligent action director could possibly be stupid enough to use them again, but rest assured, idiot, copycat, Hollywood scumbag directors like Michael Bay, have and will, and it does and will suck. Kate Bekinsale, while alluring as a vampire warrior, doesn't look too experienced or confident with the dual USP handguns she supposedly uses to dispatch so many lycan freaks.
Worst of all, are the boring, and all too familiar camera angles used in the action scenes, taken straight out of the 1947 book "Proper Camera Angles for Television and Film Action Scenes". We've seen them a million times before. Only people who know nothing about action movies and only watch American crap would think the action scenes in Underworld are cool. The only scene that worked for me was the final sword blow by our heroine, only to have it ruined by the oldest gag in the gore book, the delayed dismemberment shot. Not only is it a Japanese film and animation staple, but was also used in another Matrix wannabe called Equilibrium only last year.

In closing, Underworld may fool the mainstream masses, but action buffs hoping for something original will be sorely disappointed.