It sucks. (Can't resist a bad pun)

Rating: Null/10 (25 January 2004)

How can a film squander such a promising premise?
Vampires and werewolves must be two of the most enduring creatures of myth. Spanning many cultures and decades we have seen them explored, glorified and demonised. It took Underworld to make them boring.
The fault for that must lie squarely with the script. Somewhere underneath all the plot exposition and back-story speech-making there lurks an exciting movie. Rather than taking a new twist on any of the legends the script relies totally on the audience's knowledge of vampires at the expense of giving us real characters viewers could care about.
To compare the amount of exposition that takes place in Underworld, think of the brain-bending babble Neo cops in The Matrix: Reloaded. Its not often you just want to grab the remote and hit fast-forward in a film and when it does you know something must be seriously wrong, but I digress...
The only extraordinary ability Underworld's vampires appear have is to land happily on their feet after jumping off tall buildings. That's it. No other cool skills, senses or abilities. They may as well be a normal human for all the good it does them.
Unfortunately the werewolves fare no better. We only really get to know three, and are left to make up for ourselves what their existence is like. Do they struggle to be civilised to pass in society, only to relish the release of their inner beast selves? You won't know and probably won't care.
Kate Beckinsale as vampire warrior Selene tries hard but seems out of place and the leader of the local vampire coven Kravan (Brolly) has a good line in sneers and that's about it for his attempts at characterisation.
But the Tom Cruise award for worst bit of casting in a vampire film goes to Bill Nighy. Nighy plays Victor, the bad-ass boss vampire. When there is an argument in his crypt after being revived by Selene his first words of dialogue delivered off-camera are "Who's making all that ruckus?" Ruckus?!?! That's the kind of word my grandmother would use, not a lord of the undead. It made me laugh out-loud. The first time I actually SAW Nighy speak from underneath a lot of prosthetics I laughed again. His light English accent seemed totally out of place in the body of a looming vampire.
Visually Underworld is impressive, relying heavily on the washed-out blue look but you will be longing for the colour senses of your eyes to be stimulated by the time its all over.
However there are at least two dramatic visual short-cuts that I noticed, and I will bet there are more: CGI of a character transforming from man to werewolf is used twice, with the background changed to suit the different locations, and CGI of werewolves running along the sides of a corridor is also used at least twice, again with the background changed.
This for me sums up the whole Underworld experience. A whole slew of short cuts leaving the audience short-changed.