 |
| Pictured: Kate Beckinsale upon being informed she was contractually obligated to do another one of these. |
It's similarities to the abysmal Resident Evil films are staggering; only it's continued presence is infinitely more baffling, as there was no precedent set by an existing intellectual property. I've even made a nice graph charting their similarities:
Regardless of it's quality or necessity, Underworld - Awakening is extant. So get ready for another round of vinyl jumpsuits, pistols akimbo and blue filters; it's time to review this piece.
Let's get right down the film's biggest mistake. The film never clarifies whether Kate Beckinsale's jumpsuit is vinyl or patent leather. Just kidding but seriously Kate Beckinsale is in a skintight jumpsuit of some kind for this entire film and the filmmakers never once have the decency to recreate the strip tease scene from True Lies OR any Britney Spears video from 1999 to 2003. Unacceptable. Moving on.
As stated before, the first Underworld came out in 2003, when the world was still clamoring for more Matrix-esque action (before the Wachowski's brutally murdered their own creation) and Sony figured, "Hey, vampires can kinda fly like The Matrix, what if we just gave them guns and leather trench coats?" The idea was a rousing success, with the key word of rousing largely due to skintight jumpsuits under those trench coats.
 |
| Or the lack thereof! BOOYAAAAAA!!! Oh, I'm terrible person. |
Anyway, the story is a classic Romeo plus Juliet tale, only with Montagues and Capulets swapped for vampires and werewolves, and literary genius swapped for guns. Selene is a vampire assassin on the front lines of the war with her species' arch-nemeses, the lycans. But she falls in love with a lycan, naturally, and sequels ensue. Awakening is like the third or forth sequel. I don't really know.
The story takes a bit of a turn away from the mystical vampirism of it's predecessors, taking some science-fiction cues from the high-concept, low-execution Daybreakers. It would seem humanity recognized vampirism and lycanism as diseases and went on a massive genocidal purge, during which Selene gets put in cryostasis, only to Awaken (ing) 12 years later to a future where people still inexplicably use Cathode Ray Tube computer monitors.
Selene discovers that she has a test-tube daughter, an got evil scientists after her, and knows only that she wants to find her man who was obviously written out of the script when Scott Speedman (so sad that I didn't have to look up his name) didn't want any part of this.
 |
| So instead they got some great guest stars! Who's that? Why it's only Chris Marten, from Coldplay. |
Amongst all the inept storytelling, and placed like a square peg in the round hole where the character development was supposed to go are some decently filmed action sequences. The movie is particularly brutal. Necks gets bloodily snapped and stabbed, tracheas get chewed out, limbs get broken and headshots are met with showers of blood. It's all good fun, and you wish the film dedicated more time to it, because the 12 minutes where no one is getting stabbed kinda drag on.
While the studio may have deemed it a good idea to resurrect (ooo! Just thought of a great subtitle for the next one) the franchise because vampires are so hot right now, it will be the film's dedication to action that moves tickets. Underwold - Awakening is a great example of mindless fun. Practically any aspect of it can be completely broken down by even the slightest bit of scrutiny, but if you shut your mind off and accept the motivations that the characters loudly state in the dialogue, you'll have a good time. Just don't worry about things like a main character whose only actual contribution to the narrative is handing Kate Beckinsale a folder.
But how could you worry about something like that when Kate Beckinsale is stabbing things?
4/10
No comments:
Post a Comment