Underworld
Rating: 1 out of 5.
From the Property Assistant of Stargate and Independence Day!
You may balk at the first line of my review, but I’m serious. How does one jump from a property assistant to a feature film director, let alone have a gapping hole of 7 years in between, without doing anything? Len Wiseman, conveniently engaged (oops, now married) to the lead actress in this film, brings to life this poorly-executed cinematic turd.
I feel so horrible about this film that I’m opting not to give the DVD it’s usual advertising link on the right hand side of the review. Those feeling compelled to purchase this movie, I truly feel sorry for you. There are better things out there to entertain you … and this is not one of them, either.
I was a little more naive when I rented this movie over a year and a half ago. Today I wouldn’t even think twice about passing it by while it sits on the shelf at your local soon-to-be-bankrupt video store collecting dust. I seem to feel the need to visit a video store about once every nine to twelve months, thinking that I could be that much more satisfied if I actually put my hands on the movie that I want to watch that night. I guess that’s what happened back in March of 2004, when I walked the mostly vacant aisle of “New Releases.”
As excited as I was grabbing this title from the shelves of a cookie cutter rental facility, the only thing that I found truly exotic and entertaining about this supernatural monster action/thriller was the skin-tight vinyl and rubber outfits of Kate Beckinsale. Even that was frustrating since everything was so well under lit, you couldn’t make out too many of the curves of this unbelievably beautiful woman.
Kate Beckinsale (Pearl Harbor, Serendipidy) stars as Seline, a vampire death agent who hunts down lycans (werewolves) in attempts to even the score of a war that has been waging between the two species for the past thousand or so years. Scott Speedman (Dark Blue) enters the picture as a man pursued by the lycans for some sort of blood research. When Seline discovers that the lycans are after a human, she decides to intervene, which is not the will of the other vampires and all hell breaks loose. Seline awakens the vampire clan’s fearless leader, Viktor (Bill Nighy, much more entertaining in this), in attempts to restore power to the vampire hierarchy which seems (at least on the surface) to be based in some sort of corruption. The end product rather seems to be a political and social statement about racism.
In what seemed to be a possible interesting entry in the ongoing boring horror genre, Underworld failed in almost every way. It was very stylish with it’s action sequences, editing techniques and concept. However, it eventually fell into the abyss of all the other unoriginal sci-fi/horror/action films of the past 5 years: overdone blue-tint filtering cinematography, just enough CGI effects to make it stand out like a sore thumb and the fact that it’s really hard to sympathize with lead characters that you really don’t give a rats ass about.
Rating: 1 out of 5.
From the Property Assistant of Stargate and Independence Day!
You may balk at the first line of my review, but I’m serious. How does one jump from a property assistant to a feature film director, let alone have a gapping hole of 7 years in between, without doing anything? Len Wiseman, conveniently engaged (oops, now married) to the lead actress in this film, brings to life this poorly-executed cinematic turd.
I feel so horrible about this film that I’m opting not to give the DVD it’s usual advertising link on the right hand side of the review. Those feeling compelled to purchase this movie, I truly feel sorry for you. There are better things out there to entertain you … and this is not one of them, either.
I was a little more naive when I rented this movie over a year and a half ago. Today I wouldn’t even think twice about passing it by while it sits on the shelf at your local soon-to-be-bankrupt video store collecting dust. I seem to feel the need to visit a video store about once every nine to twelve months, thinking that I could be that much more satisfied if I actually put my hands on the movie that I want to watch that night. I guess that’s what happened back in March of 2004, when I walked the mostly vacant aisle of “New Releases.”
As excited as I was grabbing this title from the shelves of a cookie cutter rental facility, the only thing that I found truly exotic and entertaining about this supernatural monster action/thriller was the skin-tight vinyl and rubber outfits of Kate Beckinsale. Even that was frustrating since everything was so well under lit, you couldn’t make out too many of the curves of this unbelievably beautiful woman.
Kate Beckinsale (Pearl Harbor, Serendipidy) stars as Seline, a vampire death agent who hunts down lycans (werewolves) in attempts to even the score of a war that has been waging between the two species for the past thousand or so years. Scott Speedman (Dark Blue) enters the picture as a man pursued by the lycans for some sort of blood research. When Seline discovers that the lycans are after a human, she decides to intervene, which is not the will of the other vampires and all hell breaks loose. Seline awakens the vampire clan’s fearless leader, Viktor (Bill Nighy, much more entertaining in this), in attempts to restore power to the vampire hierarchy which seems (at least on the surface) to be based in some sort of corruption. The end product rather seems to be a political and social statement about racism.
In what seemed to be a possible interesting entry in the ongoing boring horror genre, Underworld failed in almost every way. It was very stylish with it’s action sequences, editing techniques and concept. However, it eventually fell into the abyss of all the other unoriginal sci-fi/horror/action films of the past 5 years: overdone blue-tint filtering cinematography, just enough CGI effects to make it stand out like a sore thumb and the fact that it’s really hard to sympathize with lead characters that you really don’t give a rats ass about.
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