Her Sexy Werepire!

By Fearless Young Orphan Underworld (2003) Directed by Lem Wiseman

I mentioned this when we talked about Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (which I gave nine Fangs out of ten for being fairly awesome). I did not initially think much of Underworld, which I probably saw eight or nine years ago. It looked to me like a well-budgeted Matrix wannabe in which the characters were more interested in posing in their goth costumes than in accomplishing anything useful.

Hey guess what. Seeing Rise of the Lycans makes Underworld a much better movie. It worked for me.

So let’s summarize real quick, for those of you who haven’t seen the movie or have forgotten that there actually was a plot. We in present times, more or less. (Kate Baking-Sale) is Selene, a vampire Death-Dealer in leather fetish wear who spends all her time killing werewolves. She is the sort-of adopted daughter of Viktor (), a vampire Elder who is snoozing away in deep coffin hibernation. Selene doesn’t like the jerk Viktor left in charge, a lazy douchebag named Kraven who has the hots for Selene and whose only claim to fame is that he killed the werewolf leader Lucian. In her excursions of werewolf-killin’, Selene sees that the werewolves are actively pursuing a particular human, Michael Corvin, for some mysterious reason. Selene takes an interest probably mostly because Michael is played by boyishly handsome . There has been a lot of double-crossing going on, let’s just say. Lucian isn’t dead after all. Kraven has been lying about that. In fact, Kraven and Lucian have made a deal, that Kraven will let Lucian operate freely and in return, Lucian will rid the world of all vampire Elders so that Kraven can be the vampire ruler. Knowing Lucian as I do now, I’m pretty sure that Lucian is aware of how little threat Kraven would ever pose to an even marginally clever werewolf: Kraven is lazy, malleable, and vain. I think their secret plot is going to work out much better for Lucian than Kraven realizes.

The human, Michael, has some special quality that is making the werewolves curious and is at the center of a plan Lucian has for stopping the vampire-werewolf war. It has to do with bloodlines, and it’s more complicated than I want to explain, but the end result is that Michael is infected by both vampire and werewolf cooties and he turns into a vamwolf or a werepire or what-have-you, which makes him look like he’s been playing in wet clay. Selene has risked her very life to protect her sexy werepire, and she has also woken Viktor from his long sleep to tattletale on Kraven, which is a big no- no apparently because Viktor is wicked pissed off about it. Then there is a lot of fighting, swords, guns, claws, fangs, etc. The fighting lasts way too long, and then the movie is over in that way that movies are over when you know a sequel is coming.

Aside from the fact that there are overlong scenes of rather ridiculous staged battling, the biggest problem I have with the film is that the loyalty-shattering attraction between Selene and Michael is something we must simply take their word for. The pair of them is rarely even together in the film, they have no conversation that doesn’t involve dire escapes or warnings. Between them they share a single, fairly chaste kiss, which Selene was using as a distraction anyway. I would hazard to guess that they haven’t spent a total of two hours together (conscious, anyway) before Selene begins throwing her life away for the guy. I would like either to see them having the chance to know one another a little first, or for Selene to outright admit, “I don’t know a damn thing about the man, but I really want me a slice of that beefcake.”

However, much of my initial blasé attitude was fixed by what I learned in Rise of the Lycans, which was basically the fully-explored history of Lucian and Viktor and their love of one woman, Viktor’s daughter Sonja. Having been given a complete back-story, suddenly Lucian’s nature makes so much damn sense. He is played by , as he was in RotL, and Sheen is an actor who can say much with his elegantly tormented gaze. He’s a character of great dignity, a man who is not so enamored of killing that he enjoys it. He is looking for an end to the war, but his solution still involves putting the vampires in their place.

Equally excellent in his portrayal is Bill Nighy as Viktor, whose grudging affection for Selene is all “We’ve got about thirty seconds to establish our Romeo-and-Juliet the more poignant for thing. Oh, wait. Does saying ‘Romeo-and-Juliet’ get the job done?” knowing how he felt about his daughter. Now, as in the past, his decisions must sacrifice love for the purity of the race, a matter which he thinks is the right way to go, though we know his thinking is doomed. The first time I saw this movie, he seemed like nothing but a vampire lord who was snotty about werewolves and had adopted a little girl for the hell of it, maybe to replace the one he’d had to dispense with, because he didn’t want to throw out all the clothes.

Seeing history repeat itself takes on a definite weight, one that the movie simply did not have for me the first time around. Not until I saw the back-story did I come to appreciate exactly what was happening here. This may be the best retro-active film improvement I can recall: a movie vastly improved by a prequel that was released six entire years later.

All right, let’s talk Fangs. Atmospherically Underworld is pretty effective, though it occurs in a world that is blue, black and constantly pouring down rain, and visually that gets tiresome. Well, I admit it does feel like an underworld. There is a complicated plot about a race war that isn’t nearly as stupid-sounding as these things can be, assuming you don’t find the idea of vampires stupid to begin with. The werewolves are pretty heavy into their roles as Lycan warriors, but the vampires themselves mostly look like bored groupies and the warriors of the bunch don’t seem to do anything much but shoot guns and do wire-fu, so nobody really acts like a vampire per se. More like spoiled rock stars, these kids are. Only Viktor himself gives us a feeling of true, old- school vampire power. And ultimately, the movie ends just when the story has reached a point when we feel it has actually started. The film’s first half spends far too much time in stand-offish expository dialog, and its second half is too preoccupied with fight scenes. So I’m going to give Underworld seven Fangs out of ten, a better score than I would have thought to give it before I saw its prequel. Amazing, what knowing a little bit about the characters can do for you.