Underworld Awakening Review

Kate Beckinsale returns as the sexy death dealer Selene in Underworld Awakening, the fourth entry in the vampire vs. Lycans franchise and the first installment made in 3D. The premise of this film is that humans have nearly wiped out all the vampires and werewolves after learning of their existence.

Taking a page from Aliens, Selene wakes up after more than a decade in suspended animation to a world she no longer knows and without her lover Michael (a body double awkwardly and silently stands in for Scott Speedman early on, but the actor himself sat this film out). Selene has been in cryogenically frozen incarceration at a biotech firm run by a sinister scientist played by V for Vendetta's Stephen Rea. (Resident Evil: Apocalypse's Sandrine Holt plays the facility's only sympathetic doctor.)

Selene discovers that not only is Michael gone, but that they have a now-adolescent daughter, Eve (India Eisley), who was born while Selene was frozen. Selene is forced to tap into whatever maternal side she has buried inside her even as she deals death to the bad guys and the humans who have slaughtered her kind.

Beckinsale & Co. Talk to IGN About Underworld Awakening

Surprise! Underworld Awakening is just like all the other Underworld movies, meaning it's a hollow and plodding genre flick full of joyless, poor man's Matrix-lite action sequences. If that's enough for you, you'll probably like this latest installment. (But you should ask yourself why that's enough for you.) But for the casual viewer or newcomer, Awakening doesn't do much to convince you why you should get into the Underworld series.

The cast does a perfunctory job, led by Beckinsale as the ever wooden Selene. Yeah, she still looks good in patent leather and trench coats shooting guns, but we get it already! Game of Thrones' Charles Dance is underutilized as a vampire coven leader; anyone hoping he'd be the series' successor to Bill Nighy will be disappointed. Michael Ealy is serviceable as a human cop; he's there primarily to brood and spout cop cliches. Theo James gets to make a big, lame "we must stand and fight!" speech and not much else, while Stephen Rea just seems embarrassed to even be in the film, pretty much phoning in his bad guy performance.

Only India Eisely as Selene's hybrid Lycan/vampire daughter seems to be having any fun, vamping it up (pun intended) in her "hulk out" scenes. Her character's relationship subplot with Selene is contrived, but it at least strives for some morsel of emotional resonance in an otherwise cold, cold film. Sadly, there's not much to Eisley's character, which is nothing new for this woefully underwritten series. (J. Michael Straczynski actually did some writing on this installment, although I'm unsure how much of his contribution is left in the final film.)

The impact of the humans' wholesale "ethnic cleansing" of the Lycans and vampires is undercut by the fact that these creatures exist to kill and eat humans! Sorry, it's kind of tough to sympathize with the beasts who want you for supper. Still, I get thematically what the story was going for with it. But it's even more difficult than usual to feel much for Selene given that she's slaying precisely all the people you'd want protecting you if werewolves and vampires were to attack. Selene is definitely darker and more brutal this time around, but she's also as emotionally vacant as ever.

The action sequences, while abundant, are nothing more than decent. If you've seen Selene strut or slide in slow-motion shooting crap then you've seen it a hundred times already. The Uber-Lycan is a nifty gimmick, but the visual effects are so cheesy and low-rent that the final result isn't terribly impressive or scary. Unsurprisingly, the film's 3D is needless and used for generic effect. All it ultimately adds is more darkness to an already dim-looking picture.

Underworld Awakening is yet another product churned out by the Screen Gems factory (which also makes the Resident Evil movies). The film looks and runs the same as the previous years' models, which is to say it's nice and shiny-looking, but runs sluggish and stinks inside.

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