Certain franchises this year I have very high hopes for like Batman, Bond and Baggins. Other franchises I have less anticipation for based on their pedigree of badassery, babes and bullshit action. Of course I want them to be entertaining but if they're not perfect I'm not going to get into a geek strop about it. Underworld Awakening, the forth film in the franchise, falls into the latter category. This sequel sees the welcome return of English fox Kate Beckinsale, although founding director Len Wiseman and male lead Scott Speedman are absent this time round (slight shame and who cares respectively).
The plot is a natural progression from the previous Beckinsale Underworld movies, this time adding the extra dimension of humans as the primary threat, some devious Lycan science experiments and a daughter for our heroine to contend with.
It's all good brainless fun with tons of monster effects, Charles Dance thesping things up right proper, and more slow motion gore and gun play to get competitor Resident Evil's Paul WS Anderson worried.
The technical aspects let the film down. The direction isn't as sleek or as gracefully edited as the three previous movies, the mandatory 3D doesn't add a penny of worth to the visual experience while the non-Gothic, concrete and steel city setting is a bit jarring to see in this series and utterly, generically bland in the grand scheme of contemporary bullshit action movies. Most irritatingly the director seem obsessed with using strobe light at every opportunity. It's fine to signify emergency lighting in a modern skyscraper, but it gets too much to bare when it's used again in an underground car park, an ancient, subterranean vampire lair and even in a medical laboratory while performing a complicated surgical process. No wonder the 3D doesn't work.
A perfectly enjoyable entry into the series that just needs a more fleshed out script and a more accomplished director to make it stand as high as the previous movies.
1 comment:
Yep, I pretty much agree.
UW4 is a solid, perfectly fun slice of monster mayhem which is enhanced a fair bit by the presence of the goddess in tight black who be Beckinsale. Mmmmmm, Selene...
Shame the script is wafer thin, the direction rather average and the look more generic than the previous three films. Apart from Beckinsale the two strongest things these films had going for them were the well thought out and dense mythology and the always stylish, nicely art directed goth look. Sad that those two elements have been dialed right back.
Still, it was decent enough fun.
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