The Violent, Bloody Fluff Franchise Is Showing Its Age
Director: Anna Foerster
Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Theo James, Tobias Menzies, Lara Pulver, Charles Dance, James Faulkner, and Bradley James
Studio: Sony
Rated: 18A
Running Time: 1 Hr, 31 Mins
January is usually a movie wasteland. Studios dump releases in the first month of the calendar fearing they will get buried any other time of year. They bank on people needing to get out of the house who will settle for anything as an escape. February used to share this dubious distinction as well but the last two years have yielded some impressive box office hits (Fifty Shades of Grey in 2015 and Deadpool last year), so January has become the go to dump month. Which is probably why Sony released Underworld: Blood Wars, the fifth instalment in the Kate Beckinsale vampire franchise the first weekend of the year.
While it’s a mildly amusing piece of dark, mindless movie fluff, Sony, Beckinsale and the entire Underworld franchise may just want to call it a day. And judging by the movie’s weak box office during the softest month of the year, the audience agrees.
Video: Sony Pictures Entertainment
Former Death Dealer Selene is an outcast, hunted by both Vampires and Lycans. While she’s on the run however, the Lycans, former slaves of the Vampires and now their sworn enemies, have a dangerous new leader named Marius. Marius has successfully unified the previously bickering factions and coven after coven of vampires have fallen to the new Lycan alliance. For the first time in its existence, the Vampire race faces extinction at the hands of the werewolves they once kept in chains.
This desperation allows ambitious new vampire leader Samira to convince the final Vampire stronghold to forgive Selene’s crimes (she killed the elder Victor in the first Underworld) and offer her sanctuary in return for training a new generation of Death Dealers to fight Marius and his Lycan army. All of that is merely a cover for Samira’s true motives. Selene soon finds herself at the center of a violent web of intrigue, ambitious vengeance and treachery. And it turns out there’s more to Marius than meets the eye.
The fifth movie since Underworld launched the franchise back in 2003, these movies are showing their age. There’s very little storytelling steam left in the Lycan-Vampire feud and the effort to milk it further is bordering on sad. Where these movies used to offer a fresh look at the vampire and werewolf myths, they’ve begun relying on recycled tropes to keep going.
Michael, the Vampire/Lycan hybrid the first two films centred on is all but gone, reduced to a post-mortem plot footnote. Eve, the daughter Selene had in the fourth film is mentioned but never seen and humans, who were hunting the two sides to extinction upon learning of their existence in the last movie, are missing completely. Not a single person who isn’t a vampire or a Werewolf makes an appearance between the opening and closing credits. Not even a cameo.
Beckinsale looks uninterested in her fourth outing as Selene and Theo James is forgettable as the rogue young Vampire David. Selene lacks the characteristic strength that has been her trademark for the entire series and there’s virtually no substance to David at all. Tobias Menzies doesn’t fill the Werewolf messiah Marius with the kind of savage charisma you’d expect an Alpha male who strikes fear into a vampire’s heart to have. The only one who really sells her role is Lara Pulver as the calculating temptress Samira. While she seductively chews up some scenery, it feels like everyone else is there merely to collect a pay cheque.
Even the visual effects haven’t kept up with the march of time. They aren’t horrible, but they aren’t the slick, groundbreaking visuals we were treated to in the first two films. In those movies we saw some things we hadn’t before, but now borderline stale and some of the visuals in Blood Wars looked clumsy and out of place. Not a good sign for a movie that relies so heavily on effects.
There’s still plenty of blood and some nice action sequences (including a gravity defying fight scene that should scratch your January action movie itch). But these movies have fallen a long way from the original Underworld back in 2003. That movie had a fresh charm going for it. It was novel. Now these films are tired and unoriginal and judging from Blood Wars underwhelming box office reception, there’s no longer much of an audience appetite for them. And when you can barely sell any tickets in January, that’s when you know it’s probably time to hang up the skin-tight vampire bondage leather.
Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment
