2003’s Underworld was a surprisingly entertaining — if completely brainless — action/horror flick that took itself serious enough to keep everything together. It certainly wasn’t original, but it was full of stunts, grand sets, old-school special effects, and Kate Beckinsale in tight leather pants. Made on a $23,000,000 budget, it managed to turn a nice profit at the box office and, of course, that made a sequel inevitable. That sequel, 2006’s Underworld: Evolution, takes everything that the first film got right and throws it all out the window.
Picking up right where the first film ended, new lovers Selene (Kate Beckinsale) and Michael (Scott Speedman) are on the run from Marcus (Tony Curran), a pissed-off elder vampire. We’re then introduced to a strange character on a ship, Alexander (Derek Jacobi), who commands a group of commandos that also appear to be hunting for Selene and Michael. Could a conflict be in the making?
Whereas the first film was full of interesting, if underdeveloped, characters, Underworld: Evolution has virtually no characters beyond Michael and Selene that are worth caring about. (And even they don’t give us much reason to care beyond the fact that they were in the first film and we know them.) There’s no sense of danger in any of the fight scenes since the main characters seem to be invincible. And, for some reason, everything is filmed in through a blue/gray filter that makes the entire affair seem even more cold and lifeless. Add to the mix the fact that the script introduces too-convenient plot devices and the sum of Underworld: Evolution‘s parts is a big “Who cares?”
Director and co-writer Len Wiseman, who’s married to Kate Beckinsale, might have thought it would be entertaining to see his wife run around in a tight leather jumpsuit for nearly two hours and, frankly, it’s not hard to see why. However, it doesn’t make for much of a movie. Throwing in a lot of gore, weaponry, and an unnecessarily complicated vampire vs. werewolf backstory doesn’t do anything but pad the running time.
The charm of the first film was its ability to put style over substance and still come up with elements that were at once familiar but uniquely put together. Underworld: Evolution is cliché after cliché with not a single original idea or sequence in its entire running time. Extremely disappointing but I’m sure we’ll see an Underworld 3.
1.0 out of 5.0 stars
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