Michael Rutshky
Published: February 8, 2006
“Underworld: Evolution,” the sequel to 2003’s “Underworld,” continues the story of a feud between a race of vampires and a clan of werewolves. Thrown in the middle is Selene, a pretty girl vampire with guns (Kate Beckinsale), and her boyfriend Michael (Scott Speedman), a hybrid of the two species. That’s as much set-up as anyone needs to enjoy a movie about vampires fighting werewolves.
However, rather than just laying out the basic premise and letting the two species duke it out, the bulk of the movie delves into the whys and hows of the feud. The story itself is really not very interesting or worthwhile. The plot started out as a simple excuse to bring werewolves face to face with vampires, but somewhere along the line it was fleshed out into some sort of Anne Rice-esque vampire epic. Unfortunately it just doesn’t work as that kind of movie.
The dialogue consisted mostly of actors rambling on and on about second-rate vampire folklore in exaggerated British accents, although not one scene took place in or around the U.K. Beckinsale’s performance as a dark heroine seemed very forced, like a female Vin Diesel. Even typically enjoyable actors such as Bill Nighy (who played Viktor) couldn’t save the script.
The writers also chose to add every possible trivial moment into the screenplay. For example, towards the end as Markus (the main vampire) is poised to release the main werewolf (his twin brother, William) from his tomb/prison, the scene is interrupted by at least five minutes of Selene flying in a helicopter looking for a place to land. Scenes like this happen frequently in the movie, delaying the action and killing the suspense.
Other moments are obviously meant to be poignant, but are instead quite the opposite, and really very frustrating to sit through. Director Len Wiseman decided to use slow motion in nearly every scene of the movie. The worst example is a scene in which Michael is splashing black paint over all the windows in the warehouse they are hiding in to keep the sunlight from getting through. The scene itself is little more than several minutes of the actor punching holes in paint cans and flinging paint around in slow motion.
At one point, the movie breaks for an abrupt soft-core sex scene. Although it wasn’t very convincing, it was much more graphic than a typical sex scene. It almost seemed like they shot a much heavier sex scene but edited it to look like a classy love scene.
The digital effects in the fight scenes looked nice, but the fighting as a whole could have been better. A gun is not a very intimate weapon, and having the heroine in a stationary position blasting away at a werewolf 50 feet above her doesn’t make for the most compelling action.
Once again slow motion is abused as a cheap way of making the scenes feel more dramatic, but actually it neutered potentially exciting fight scenes. The final battle was also very anti-climactic: the heavy meeting his demise at the hands of a convenient plot device that could have been seen coming from a mile away.
The movie itself could have been much more entertaining if the writers played to the movie’s one inherent strength: no one has ever done a vampires vs. werewolves movie series before. If only they had realized their limitations and simply let it be a fun action movie brawl between two classic horror icons, rather than turning it into Rice-lite.