Review No.54: Underworld Awakening

I apologise dear readers for staying away for a week or so but for some of the films on this list I have to do a little research before delving in. When I say that I'm mainly talking about the sequels that have come out this year to earlier films that I haven't yet watched which over the coming months will include the Ice Age, Ghost Rider and Twilight franchises but first up was the Underworld films. I decided to watch Underworld and the sequel Underworld: Evolution but not the prequel as I surmised that that would not give me any extra information in terms of the characters' journeys. The first film saw vampire Selene help her kind in a war against the Lycans, a superform of werewolves, however she found out that a bunch of the vampire elders had conspired against her so destroyed them. In the second film she and vampire/lycan hybrid Michael learnt more of the history of the two races while trying to simultaneously survive and have sex with each other at the same time. In Awakening the threat to the vampires and the lycans is from the humans who have kidnapped Selene and Michael and have frozen them both with the former waking up twelve years in the future a time in which the humans have tried to kill of as many of both species as they can. Predictably Selene escapes with a young girl who turns out to be her and Michael's daughter she is helped by a vampire named David and sheltered briefly by his father played by Charles Dance until she is cast out following an attack by a breed of super lycans. These lycans are later revealed to be Stephen Rea and his son who were supposed to have been working on a vaccine to stop the lycans but in fact were creating a more powerful strain. As you would imagine though Selene is able to finish them off with ease and she and Eve then try to find Michael or at least set up for yet another film in the franchise.

When sitting down to watch Underworld Awakening I wasn't expecting much as the first two films had essentially involved CGI wolves, Kate Beckinsale in leather and a lot of shooting. However for me this was certainly the better of the two sequels if not quite up there with the original mainly as the threat to the lycans came mainly from men. I liked the fact that it concentrated on parent/child relationships and I feel that there was more dialogue here than there had been in the first two films despite the fact that this was drastically shorter than both of those. I feel then that that's definitely one of the negatives here as are the sections which just revert back to the tried and tested Underworld format albeit with slightly larger lycans. Beckinsale essentially is on autopilot throughout although there are some good hammy performances, as there always are in the Underworld films, from the likes of Charles Dance and Stephen Rea in addition I did like the fact that the woeful Scott Speedman is nowhere to be found here. In closing I would say that if you wanted more or less the exact same thing from your Underworld films then you're in luck with Awakening, which to be fair does have a little more to offer, but it's far too short and reverts back to an easy formula on too many occasions.

Verdict: Despite some promise this film is too short and diverts back to the Underworld format which I'm not a fan of so I'm going to award it 4.5/10