Give me Blade anyday!

Rating: 1/10 (6 March 2004)

Take Blade and add most of The Crow and The Matrix and you have this. The latter two I didn't particularly enjoy and Underworld was just as dull and messy as the trailer made it out to be.
Amidst a clutter of cliched sets, impossible to differentiate from each other, and heavily overused lightning and rain (I'm sure there are OTHER ways of creating a gothic atmosphere) an uninteresting and meandering plot slowly fizzles to life. Apparently Vampires and Werewolves have been fighting for years but a couple of them want the war to end. But with no indication of who is good and bad and the lack of a clearly defined hero there's no way to engage with the characters and no reason to care what happens to them.
The SFX are of the jumping thru the air in slow motion while spinning and shooting and doing the laundry variety. Nothing you haven't seen a zillion times before. It wasn't interesting the first hundred times I saw it and this movie is no exception.
As you might expect from a movie of this sort, the music is nothing but someone murdering a thrash metal guitar. It's just noise and chaos that matches the incoherent blur onscreen. Many elements of this film lead to exciting possibilities but they've all been thrown away in favor of easy trash. Technically efficient it may well be but Underworld is a failure on every other level.
And what's with the title. At no point in the entire movie is there interaction with the 'real' world. Just a load of running around in sewers and darkly lit mansion corridors. The sense of having an insight into a world that is not meant to be seen by human eyes is non-existent. Even the kidnapped human acts as if the discovery of Vampires and Werewolves is nothing to out of the ordinary.
Highlyclichedlookinggothicmovieworld would have been a more appropriate title.
The one star is purely for Kate Beckinsdale in a leather outfit.
I have the DTS Region 3 edition of this movie. It has a great DTS soundtrack (wow, now can really appreciate the mind-numbingly loud sound effects and awful music). And the 2.35:1 anamorphic picture is super. But no matter how good looking it is, Underworld is still terrible.