“Underworld Evolution” is What’s Wrong with Movies

The number one movie in America this week-end earned $27.6 million. It didn’t win a Golden Globe, and one can expect nothing on Oscar night either. "Underworld Evolution" is everything that is wrong with movies today.

The film details some kind of war between vampires and werewolves, both of whom descended from the same man, Alexander Corvinus (played by Sir Derek Jacobi, who must really need the money). Thus, it is categorized as horror. However, as Grandpa Simpson said, “I’ve coughed up scarier stuff than that.” Horror films rarely scare people who can remember tense days during the Cold War (knowing that the world was minutes away from being radioactive ash) or who know anything about Pol Pot, Idi Amin or Saddam Hussein’s boys. This doesn’t even rise to the level of a slasher film; while it has blood everywhere, most of it is quietly congealing on the floor or someone’s chin.

What little story exists revolves around an attempt to free the main werewolf from his prison and the efforts of various vampires and a hybrid (a mix of vampire and lycan – short for lycanthrope) to stop that from happening. The action takes place in eastern Europe, perhaps in Hungary, or Poland or Russia (the alphabets on the signage kept switching). Transylvania is in Romania these days, but Latin-based Romanian stands out against the more Slavic languages or Hungarian, and there was no sign of it. Continuity wasn’t in the budget.

Since the language doesn’t matter much, neither does the writing. The dialogue is stilted and artificial while the exposition is convoluted and plain bad. What Hitchcock called the McGuffin (the object that made the story move) in this film is a circular key to the werewolf’s sarcophagus-like prison, which has a nice cross in the middle. Seems the writer has never seen a vampire movie – they don’t like crosses. Yet, he has them carrying this thing around for close to two hours.

Kate Beckensale, who was in Kenneth Branagh’s film of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing thirteen years ago, still can fill a catsuit, but she hasn’t much to work with in the acting department, and doesn’t really try. Except for one scene with Sir Derek, there is no acting. The gentlemen appearing in the film are faceless, unmemorable non-entities and the less said the better.

As for the special effects, well, really who cares? A vampire gets pushed into a helicopter rotor blade, a werewolf gets his head pulled off at the roots, and the audience “oohs” appropriately. However, the werewolves all lack the basic majesty of wolves, and appear to get the mange every full moon. The vampires have huge leathery wings with neat stabbing things at the far end, but they fly about as well as chickens in a wind tunnel.

This isn’t a movie; it’s a non-interactive video game. Yet, since the market rewarded this approach, more will follow. One only hopes that Ms. Beckensale and Sir Derek have finally fixed their financial situations so they needn’t appear in such crap ever again.


© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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