Another Slam-Bang Vampire Vs. Werewolves Shoot'em Up!!!

Rating: 10/10 (30 January 2012)

Aside from a brief appearance at the end, latex-clad Kate Beckinsale sat out the last "Underworld" outing "Underworld: Rise of the Lycans." Basically, "Lycans" served as a prequel to "Underworld" and its swashbuckling sequel "Underworld: Evolution." In other words, the "Underworld" filmmakers leaped backwards to explore the origins of the franchise, and "Lycans" wrapped everything up in neat, tidy fashion. In "Underworld: Awakening," pistol-packing vampire dame-in-black Selene returns with a vengeance, and she finds herself up to her pretty ears in new shenanigans that pose even greater problems. Sequels are usually measured by how much they develop a franchise. Bad sequels deliver nothing more than the same old stuff with nothing new to distinguish them. In the imaginative hands of scenarists Len Wiseman, John Hlavin, J. Michael Straczynski, and Allison Burnett, "Underworld: Awakening" takes the franchise in a fresh direction without undermining everything that occurred before it.
For the record, Wiseman helmed the first "Underworld" escapade, and he has produced all four of these exciting, suspenseful vampire versus werewolf sagas. "Underworld: Awakening" qualifies as Hlavin's freshman bow as a scribe. Anybody who has seen an episode of the legendary sci-fi series "Babylon 5" should recognize Straczynski as the genius who created that franchise. Meanwhile, Burnett penned both "Untraceable" and the remake of "Fame." They've furnished our trigger-happy heroine with a number of new challenges. Swedish co-directors Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein have taken over the helm, and the audacious action has neither been as fast nor as character-driven as this entry. You could say that "Underworld: Awakening" knocks the bottom out of the franchise. Although you have to contend with those cumbersome 3-D spectacles, this spectacle of blood, gore, and violence is definite worth the trouble. Mind you, "Underworld: Awakening" doesn't imitate those old-fashioned 3-D adventure that hurled everything but the kitchen sink at you. Sometimes, you get to see a little flying glass and some blood, but the 3-D manages to contribute to the action. The scene where a gargantuan werewolf slings automobiles at our heroine looks as cool as the scenes where the werewolf mutates from human form.
The chief difference between "Underworld: Awakening" and its predecessors is that mankind no longer stands ignorantly on the sidelines of all the mayhem. Co-helmers Mårlind and Stein provide a prologue that updates us about the radical changes that have transpired, in case you haven't seen any of the earlier epics. The fangsters and their mortal enemies the Lycans have fought each other virtually to the point of extinction. Now, they are battling mankind and humans have taken these monsters seriously enough to virtually wipe them out. Indeed, the best of the vampire Death Dealers, Selene (Kate Beckinsale of "Much Ado About Nothing") has been captured and cryogenically frozen. In other words, when she breaks out of cold storage, our heroine learns that she has been cooling her heels for more than a decade. A shady biotech film called Antigen has keep Selene on ice along with another subject. When Selene escapes, she discovers that the other subject who has gotten away, Eve (India Eisley of "Headspace"), is none other than her daughter. Celebrated television talk show host Art Linkletter used to say that kids do the darnest things. Wait until you see what Eve does. Indeed, Eve is a hybrid from the union of vampire babe Selene and werewolf hunk Michael (Scott Speedman) and Antigen chief researcher Dr. Jacob Lane (Stephen Rea of "The Crying Game") has been grooming the little gal to act as a DNA donor.
Meanwhile, the remaining vampires have gone underworld, including some of higher-ups, among them autocratic Thomas (Charles Dance of "Last Action Hero"), who is content to hide out with the covens. No sooner has Eve escaped than Lane sends everything that he has after her and Selene. Although he doesn't have a major role in this adventure, Michael is still alive after an opening gambit that made it appear as if he were toast. The bulk of the action in "Underworld: Awakening" is Selene struggling to keep Eve out of Lane's hands and scalpel. Along the way, the bodies pile up and nobody has any qualms about pulling the trigger on anybody. When Selene isn't tangling with the humans, who are everywhere, she is menaced by Quint (Kris Holden-Ried of "K-19: The Widowmaker"), a man who can shape-shift at will into a Goliath of a werewolf. During one sensational scene, Quint watches as Selene battles another werewolf at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Handily, he transforms his fist into a mighty claw and tears the cables holding the elevator car, several floors above him, and then watches with amusement as it plunges like giant anvil toward Selene. Of course, Selene survives this larger-than-life obstacle, but it is the manner in which she emerges that makes the scene as well as "Underworld: Awakening" so terrific.
Clocking in at a nimble 89-minutes, "Underworld: Awakening" doesn't dawdle. Beckinsale performs her acrobatics with the same poise that she dazzled us with in the first two "Underworld" shoot'em ups. Another interesting character who appears in this installment is Detective Sebastian (Michael Ealy of "2 Fast 2 Furious"), who survives the fracas because he can hit what he shoots at and he doesn't perform the usual stupid human tricks that most expendable cops do in these movies. There are some other surprises left for you, but you'll have to see the film to catch them. Meantime, anybody who enjoyed the earlier entries in the franchise should find "Underworld: Awakening" an eminently serviceable reboot of the fang & claw franchise.