Underworld: Evolution

I’m so sick of Hollywood Executives. Clearly they have absolutely no understanding of their target audience, or, for that matter, human beings in general. I’ve no doubt that the planning session for this movie went something like this:

Hollywood Exec #1 (HE1): Let’s make a sequel to the reasonably successful and highly entertaining movie, Underworld.

Hollywood Exec #2 (HE2): Yes, let’s do it. And we should get the same actors. It shouldn't be too hard--Kate Beckinsale actually agreed to do Van Helsing, so it won’t be much of a stretch for her to do a sequel for Underworld. Plus, she sure is hot in that leather suit.

HE1: Oh totally. And that dude from Felicity will probably be a sure thing, despite his breakthrough performance in the XXX sequel.

HE2: Agreed. So, does anyone remember the plot from the first Underworld?

Underworld Writer (UW): I do.

HE1: Anyone? No? Well that’s too bad, because I’m pretty sure that the first Underworld left itself wide open for a sequel. I mean it practically screamed that there would be a sequel, the way they left it and all.

UW: Um, yeah because I wrote it.

HE1: Oh well, I guess we'll start from scratch then.

HE2: So basically, let’s just take Kate Beckinsale’s character and Bill Nighy’s character and explain how vampires and werewolves were created in the first place—and then let’s just throw in some footage from the first movie to tie it all together.

HE1: Sounds good to me, I’ll just have my 8 year-old kid dog write the script.

UW: Um, excuse me....

HE2: Should we review the script after your dog writes it?

HE1: What the fuck for?!

HE2: Good point.

UW: Guys?

Thus was born Underworld: Evolution. I wasn't expecting anything spectacularly mind-blowing, but I was expecting at least a small level of intelligence behind the project. All was not lost, however, as Underworld: Evolution was extremely nice to look at, since the effects were really pretty cool, and the fight scenes were very well choreographed. One has to respect the time and effort spent into having competent stunt doubles perform carefully maneuvered kicks and jumps, rather than resorting to simply to shaking the camera wildly about in order to obscure the fact that some actor looks like a complete goof doing martial arts kicks. Kudos to the computer geeks as well for the werewolf transformation effect, because it looked pretty rad.

The plot for this movie, as stated before, was nothing short of catastrophic. It picks up where Underworld left off (sort of), in which Selene (Kate Beckinsale) and Michael (Scott Speedman) are on the run after Selene slices Viktor's (Bill Nighy) head off. Michael, as you may recall, is a vampire/werewolf hybrid--the first of his kind, and ostensibly a creature with "limitless" powers as Selene theorizes at one point. I could never quite tell what these supposed limitless powers entailed, aside from tagging along and being generally quite useless. For an all-powerful being, Michael gets the crap kicked out of him in almost every fight, but not before he carefully removes his shirt prior to each duel. Afterward, Selene is always forced to feed him some of her own blood just to keep the guy alive. Amazingly enough, however, Selene actually finds this "pathetic weakling" trait irresistible, and the requisite sex scene is awkwardly and gratuitously crammed into the story. Their next step in the plan of attack is to wake up the last remaining elder of the vampire clan, Marcus (Tony Curran), who actually turns out to be kind of an asshole, so after he wakes up they have to go ahead and try to kill him. With bullets. Which will obviously never work on a vampire, but whatever. Marcus decides that he's going to go rescue his brother, William, from his thousand-year imprisonment for the crime of being a big nasty werewolf. Oh and for, you know, killing every living thing in sight so that it transforms into a vicious werewolf entity that can't turn back into human form again. Fabulous idea. So now Selene and Michael--or pretty much just Selene herself--has to stop Marcus from waking up his brother William, blah blah blah.

Perhaps what was most annoying about this movie was the fact that it wasn't even consistent with itself, nevermind its predecessor. It seemed that Marcus would impale some hapless vampire with his wings, which would sometimes kill the vampire but not always. The werewolves could sometimes be killed with a simple knife to the head (not even a silver one!), but other times one was forced to completely rip off its head just to stop it. And then there was Michael--who knows what kills that guy, but believe me, it doesn't take much apparently. Clearly the filmmakers had no idea what to do with his character, so they just ignored him and hoped he would go away on his own. He didn't.

I was so excited to see this movie, but so disappointed when I walked out of the theater. As I said, the effects were spectacular, and everything about the film was visually appealing. I can stand a certain level of inconsistency with movies, especially sci-fi and/or action ones, but this film was just absurd. I definitely recommend it as a DVD rental because it's cool to look at, but this way you can fast-forward through all the dialogue.