Underworld (2003) with only a moderate budget is a very glossy expensive-looking film with the fashion-costumes having more personality than the characters, like a very pretty comic book printed on shiny paper, or airbrush-detailed on the doors of a big black RV.

The premise is simple: There's a war between the Lycans (werewolves) & the Vampires. This battle is going on in the sewers & on the streets around us, unseen by normal people though you'd think they'd stick out with those cool leather dusters & s/m outfits.

This simple idea is ornamented with back-story "history" bits & "rules" for how various game pieces, I mean characters, function. Old Lycans have more power than young Lycans for example. No matter how tricked out it is with side-complexities, however, little beyond the visuals count for squat.

If judged for its visual beauty exclusively, it scores quite high. The urban environment is a wonderful gothic version of Prague. The female warrior vampire Selene (Kate Beckinsale) is powerful & unbelievably gorgeous.

When she makes a leap from a high building ledge to a street, keeping her dancer's pose, nothing could be more Computer Graphix; it's not the least bit real. But neither is a drawing in a comic book, & the CGI has to be taken as the cinematic version of a comic book's colored inks.

Visually it works, though it's easy to have the attitude toward the film that its excessive fashionableness is nothing but an extended music video imitating The Matrix. But with a shift of viewer's mood, & a forgiving attitude toward rank commercialism, Underworld is easily praised for its sexiness & cool clothes. Just don't look too hard at the story; don't expect suspense or horror. It's an action-packed cartoon plus corny taboo love story between Selene & a werewolf.

The film is so commercially targeted that at times it feels like the work of a jaded old pro who knows what the young & especially the unthinking masses will happily pay too much to see. It's instead Ken Wiseman's directorial debut, though previously he had been involved as Art Director for purely commercial glitzy empty-headed successes like Independence Day (1996), besides doing MTV music videos & commercials for video games. The influence of video games lends a geeky sci-fi nerd quality to the commercialism that makes Underworld a bit more appealing than mere commerce.


A bigger, more convoluted sequel to Underworld might seem promising at first blush. The first film had an elegant look & seemed to be designed by very talented airbrush comic book illustrators, but with script by talentless wargamers or video game geeks. Given its major lapses of merit, the promise of getting more bang for your bucks in the sequel should be fairly easy to live up to, since all it takes is the bigger budget.

"Bigger & better" alas adds up to Underworld: Evolution (2006) being merely bigger. Moving the action out of the decadent urban environment makes it by & large less visually stimulating, though the creative team's desire to have a different environment is understandable, lest Underworld: Evolution come off as a clone or remake rather than a sequel.

The core idea for these films remains simplicity itself: vampires & werewolves have been at war for several centuries; they constitute two branches of the same family; & they might one day become united in the form of a hybridized line.

Very much like sniffling taped-glasses nerds playing Dungeons & Dragons, or the Magic role playing card game, the world & its history & plethora of back-stories & lineages & magical rules & restrictions of old & new powers...all these D&D side-issues expanded & expanded, still without any storytelling skills coming in evidence, because you don't learn to tell good stories by playing fun games.

We end up with the machinery of a video game & a half-dozen role playing instruction manuals giving a book-length history of everyone (who nevertheless remain largely indistinguishable). The simple core idea gets lost under the weight of ornamentation, with too little story & no suspense.

To an extent this is The Matrix crossed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or the video game versions thereof, being only the worst of each rather than combining the best.

There was only one long bit I unreservedly enjoyed, & that was the opening flashback to a medieval world of lycanthropes, vampires, swords & sorcery, with the best combination of animation & live action I've ever seen, creating a horrifically compelling otherworld. But when that stuff runs its course & the film starts over in the modern world, it never again gets quite as thrilling.

The modern setting is a a story of machine-guns & sorcery in a series of largely subterranean gothic sets that are sometimes darkly pretty but invariably a phony looking mix of painted styrofoam & computer graphix.


The ultimate vampire has cool wings that appear & disappear at will, not because it's logical but because it's difficult to animate wings for more than a half minute at a time.

So let's just pretend the wings suck into the body or shrink to the size of a pimple when not in use. The ultimate vampire also has a leaf-nosed bat's snout, not at all like a vampire bat, so instead of sucking human blood, this guy should've been eating bugs.

With all the gunfire & butchery of cool monsters, it's like watching someone else play a video game, insufficient to qualify as a movie.

If super great cartoon computer FX is all one wants of a film, this is a winner. If watching twelve-year-olds playing the video games in the lobby is more fun than watching a movie, Underworld: Evolution is the cat's meow.

And of course a babe like Kate Beckinsdale (married to the director) dressed up in a shiny black plastic dominatrix outfit is truly ace.

But the damned story is barely adequate for the crummiest comic book adventure. And personally, I require a story with all the glitzy animation & gunfire. Indeed, a film can do without the animation much more easily than it can do without a story.

Imagine looking inside the Bullwinkle balloon at the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, hoping to find gigantic lungs & a pulsing heart, but all you find is hot air & squeaky-voice helium. Like that balloon, Underworld: Evolution has an impressive skin, but has nothing inside it.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl