Great Mileage on the Hybrids

By Fearless Young Orphan Underworld: Evolution (2006) Directed by Lem Wiseman

Picking up right where Underworld left off, Evolution follows the further misadventures of Selene and her sexy werepire Michael as they try to . . . er, try to accomplish something. Mostly I think they’re just trying not to get killed. They are a vampire and a vamp/werewolf hybrid who seem to invite trouble of the type that got most of Selene’s coven killed in the last movie. Selene and Michael begin the film by running and hiding, and frankly continue most of the movie by running and hiding, with some violent fight scenes and a lot of night driving in Canada (with some admittedly stunning scenery). They are pursued by Markus, the last living Elder vampire of Selene’s coven. Markus is something of a mess now, not just a vampire but also a hybrid thanks to some convenient werewolf blood leakage that got into his crypt . . . oh for heaven’s sake, it’s so complicated to explain.

Look, there’s a legend about the Corvinus family, the sons of which are a bunch of troublemakers – they would have to be, because they were the first werewolf and the first vampire and that is important, honest it is. But I am not going to sit here and try to type all that crap out. The point is that Markus is trying to get to the live-burial chamber of his werewolf brother William and release the poor slob. After a millennium caged, imagine how bad that doggy needs to go walkies! Thanks to plot contrivance, Selene is the only person who might actually know where that burial chamber actually is located. Selene wants to stop Markus from freeing William because that would make a big mess. Michael goes along because Selene is his hot vampire chicky in a leather catsuit and he has nothing else to do anyhow.

Selene and Michael’s journey takes them to various dank atmospheric locations, where they hide out or pick up scraps of clues that can lead them to the next dank atmospheric location. In this, the movie is rather like a video game, each stop introducing a new level with its own share of mobs to kill. Lucky for us, the levels look pretty good, if you like your movies mostly black and blue, and a lot of splashy water. The film is heavy on style and not overly concerned with story, a rather funny thing to say considering how convoluted the story feels at times.

So if we cannot exactly rely on the plot itself to be fascinating, we turn instead to the characters, who are always a better bet for entertainment’s sake anyway. Kate Baking- Sale, as Selene, gives a serious effort here to lend gravity to her part and it pays off. She’s more interesting and sympathetic in this film than she was in the last, particularly since she seems to feel a regretful but undeniable attachment to her sexy werepire Michael. Since this film takes place right after the first movie, I submit that they still haven’t known each other more than a total of 24 hours, but I suppose I need to stop nitpicking that. Selene has chosen her man and is doing everything she can to ensure their ability to stay safely together. They have just enough time for a cut-scene between fighting levels to make monkey-love in a cargo box. I hope it was worth Selene’s time, because I bet it takes 45 minutes to wriggle into that leather suit and you don’t want to take it off for just any old reason.

“I also like monkey-love.” Michael (Scott Speedman) is playing the role normally reserved for the token female in an action movie: he’s the pretty prize with a useful special talent (i.e., the haughty royal with the secret information, the villain’s mistress who knows the layout of the secret hideout), but he’s preferably seen and not heard. His function is to be desirable and give our heroine something to fight for. After seeing a thousand movies in which the gender roles were opposite this, it’s nice to see this difference. In her own way, Selene reaches for the heights of Ellen Ripley of Alien fame by being the hero and taking care of the boys.

Our villain, Markus, has an awesome gimmick. As a vampire/werewolf hybrid he is the yin to Michael’s yang (but only Selene can touch Michael’s yang, remember) by being dominantly bat with some wolfy characteristics, and for some reason that means he can turn into one hellacious looking demon with some wicked dangerous wings. So he looks fabulously scary. As a character he is not nearly as interesting, but I’m not immune to eye candy. There is a largely pointless but rather amazing-looking chase scene involving a truck and a mountainous Canadian road in which Markus gets to show off his badassery thanks to CGI. I was surprised that some of the CGI in this film was rather dumpy looking, but maybe they spent all their money on the truck chase, because that bitch looked great. A winged Markus is quite visually riveting, especially trying to dismantle a moving semi.

Another pleasure is seeing Sir Derek Jacobi making an appearance of surprising dignity as the oldest immortal in the world, Alexander Corvino, the father of all these messy boys. Jacobi is a powerful actor regardless of what he is doing, and so his scenes seem like they are more important than they actually are. He’s arriving on a spooky, badassed teched-out ship to lend his aid to Selene for reasons that, well, I don’t understand and won’t even try to explain. Suffice to say, he probably wants her to do the killing because he cannot bring himself to kill his own sons. But trust me, he’s a welcome presence in the movie and, ya know, quite possibly a more interesting choice of man than Michael, even if he does look old enough to be Selene’s granddad. Hey, when you’re Stage cred, bitches. immortal, what’s the big deal? Let’s get around to the Fangs of the matter. Underworld: Evolution is in itself not a great movie, though it manages not to be an out- and-out bad movie either. The thing is, it remains fairly interesting even when the fight scenes extend from here to forever, so I’m wont to be a little forgiving toward it. More to the point, the vampires acted more like vampires than before: less goth posing, more Michael is just the pretty sidekick. blood-drinking and sun-fearing and the stressing of bloodlines and power. I missed the presence of Lucian as a really sympathetic antagonist (I hesitate to call him a villain) because we have to deal with Markus, who is only interesting when he looks like the Archdemon Employee of the Month. Kate Baking-Sale’s performance and the presence of Derek Jacobi lend much-needed spark to the overall darkness. Finally, I’m still reaping the benefits of having watched Rise of the Lycans first, in that the tale of Lucian and Viktor continues to resonate in everything, though to a lesser extent since technically both those characters are dead in this film. So I’m actually going to give this one eight Fangs out of ten. Yes, I know. It’s weird. But the Fangs don’t lie.