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Review: Underworld by tim molloy I like high-concept movies more than anyone. Cowboys vs. Pirates? I'm there. Freddy vs. Jason? Sign me up. Pandas vs. Robots? I'm there again, and this time I'm not leaving. So when Kate Beckinsale, the wonderfully catty girl from Last Days of Disco, one of my favorite movies, explained in the preview that Underworld was about a centuries-long battle "between vampires and Lycans -- werewolves," I knew this movie would be gold. I mean, come on, they even went to the trouble of using a fancy word for "werewolves." All of which makes the suckiness of Underworld especially disappointing. The werewolves look OK, and the vampires are super sexy if you're into the black leather, pale skin and translucent-blue-eyes thing. (And who isn't?) But Underworld blows it big time with its failure to really exploit the very qualities that make vampires and werewolves so fucking awesome. The coolest thing about both creatures is the way their awesome powers are tempered by some sort of inner torment. Vampires need human blood, which some of them find, you know, troubling. At least in those fun Anne Rice novels. In Underworld the vampires just live off some kind of cloned plasma. How humane! How convenient! How boring. Lycans, meanwhile, are tortured by their lack of control over their sudden transformations from boring people to scary monsters. Ever seen the old movie where the dad has to be locked in a jail cell before his son's eyes so he doesn't change and kill everybody? Well, I did, and it was superb. But stupid Underworld just explains at the beginning that the werewolves can change between man and dog form at will. Come on, Underworld, do your research. Like the people who made Teen Wolf. So there you have Underworld's inherent flaw: Werewolves and vampires (who have reflections and never turn into bats, by the way, in the film's boring interpolation of vampire lore) stripped of the weaknesses -- and tension -- that make them so interesting. You might think that freed of any real weaknesses, the vampires and Lycans would be the most kick-ass monsters ever, right? Well, no. In Underworld, the centuries-long battle is waged with firearms and clunky martial arts. Bite marks and howls are few and far between. In the film's supposed climax -- which ridiculously doesn't feature much of Beckinsale, who is hot enough to make things seem interesting even when they aren't -- the lead vampire faces off with a vampire-werewolf hybrid whose very existence is supposed to be the culmination of this centuries-long battle "between vampires and Lycans -- werewolves." It's more like the culmination of a centuries-long battle between "black belts and kickboxers -- people with YMCA memberships." It doesn't help that the hybrid looks like a skinny Incredible Hulk -- from the TV show, not the movie -- and that the vampire looks older than Christopher Lee. (And as an aside, since vampires are stuck at the age they're at when they're bitten and transformed, how much would it suck to get tagged at 70? And what fetishist vampire would bite a 70-year-old man, anyway? I'd bite someone who looked more like Beckinsale, but that's me. I'm super healthy and normal.) None of Underworld's many flaws, which also include cheap sound and visual effects, prevented it from becoming the nation's top movie at the box office in its opening weekend. Critics did their best to make people see The Fighting Temptations instead, with Roger Ebert warning, "It's so impossible to care about the characters in the movie that I didn't care if the vampires or werewolves won." One last thing. This is one of those movies where all the vampires have overly icy-sounding names like "Kraven" or "Selene." Apparently names like "Todd" and "Mindy" are vampire repellent. The makers of Underworld of course ignore the whole deal with garlic and crosses. 
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