"Your incompetence is becoming most taxing"

Rating: 7/10 (26 January 2009)

Kate Beckinsale in Underworld is a clear inspiration taken from recent vampire/goth/sci fi movies, particularly the Blade and Matrix series, and the audience will surely be making comparisons, even subconsciously. She embodies the sleek, ass-kicking skills of Trinity from The Matrix but her vampire element reminds me more of the surprisingly effective performance that Parker Posey gave in Blade 3.
You see, Beckinsale is Selene, a vampire who has devoted her existence to destroying "lycans," the werewolves who have sleeked up their image for the 21st century by removing the 'thrope' from the end of their title. It seems that the vampires and the lycans have been involved in a raging war with each other for well over 1,000 years, which prompted me to wonder what the average kill rate is for a vampire or lycan soldier. Either they breed really really fast or they're just not very good warriors.
At any rate, Selene stumbles across a conspiracy involving the leader of the lycans, Lucian, and the leader of the vampires, Kraven, to combine the blood of the two species and create a new breed of nightwalker that would be more powerful than both. Vampires and werewolves are incompatible even at the cellular level (even their blood fights when combined), but Selene still fears that Kraven's and Lucian's plot would endanger the vampires, so she awakens their dark lord from a mummified hibernation a full century ahead of schedule.
The intricacies of the plot, however, are noticeably more complex than the material can sustain. There are three rulers of the vampires, and at any given time there is one awake and ruling and two in hibernation. Selene's waking of Viktor 100 years early is a sacred violation that hasn't been broken in 1,400 years. She needs to find get conclusive proof of this dark conspiracy or even Viktor would be powerless to save her from a most vicious punishment.
I missed the part, by the way, where they explained why Viktor couldn't be put back to sleep after having woken up, but no matter. He's awake now and his gradual transformation from a mummy into a cadaverous vampire leader is one of the more interesting make-up effects in the movie.
The special effects, by the way, are the thing that will make or break the movie. It's dark and dreary from beginning to end, which is not unexpected in a film about a war between werewolves and vampires, but the darkness gets a little repetitive long before the end of the movie.
Upon wakening, Viktor finds himself in the middle of a situation in which this vampire woman has broken a 1,000 year old tradition to report to him a virtually impossible conspiracy, even while she is falling in love with a lycan-infected human named Michael, which is strictly forbidden (it's forbidden because he's a lycan, by the way, not because his name is Michael).
Scott Speedman is given remarkably little to do in the entire film, although the transformation of his character provides for what is by far the film's best battle scene. The soundtrack is loud and violent, like much of the rest of the movie, and while it manages to avoid adding much to the vampire or werewolf genres despite having combined them together so well, there are some interesting ways that the movie brings the story into the 21st century. Not only do these ancient creatures now have cell-phones, but high-powered handguns that fire liquid-silver and phosphorescent bullets. They have, it seems, "harnessed sunlight as a weapon."
With these kinds of things going on, you might expect a better movie, but it's fast and brutal and stylish and ends with the promise of a sequel in which everything that we have come to learn from this movie will be completely changed. And for something that could so easily have been written off as a Blade or Matrix rip-off at the time of its release, that's a pretty successful outcome.