Once in a great while a movie comes out that can be predicted wholly without even stepping foot in a theater. Just by watching the trailer, you will know exactly how the entire plot unfolds, who may or may not live through it, the types of adversity the main character is going to face, and just how stupid everything is going to be.
That once in awhile has occurred, and its name is Underworld: Awakening.
On to the review!
There’s not really too much to say about the fourth Underworld film. I will admit that I haven’t seen any of the second and only parts of the third while waiting to take a urinalysis (hooray military!). I will also argue that I missed nothing.
Underworld: Awakening begins by filling us in on what we ‘missed.’ Apparently humanity now knows that there are Vampires and werewolves..sorry, Lycans…and they’re pretty keen on destroying the shit out of both ‘evil’ races. Unfortunately it’s not enough to make our heroine react to mankind’s kneejerk reaction to blow everything up. No, that might lead to something icky like a moral quandary. Instead we’re going to add a bunch of terrible plot twists.
Instead, Selene (Kate Beckinsale) and her half-Lycan-half-Vampire boyfriend are about to get on a boat to leave England behind and start anew somewhere else. Somalia, maybe? I hear they’ve got relatively few Lycan/Vampire sanctions. Before they can cast off, however, the humans knock out Selene and her boyfriend (Michael Corvin, played by Scott Speedman, I think. His role is so small IMDB doesn’t even credit him).
Flash-forward a dozen years and Patient Two has just awoken Patient One from cryogenic sleep. Now, if I tell you that Patient One is Selene, can you guess who Patient Two is? What if I tell you that it’s not the boyfriend? Unfortunately, I figured out exactly who was who in about 3 seconds, leaving me free to laugh at the utter stupidity of the characters on screen as they deal with their surroundings. Every single situation the movie puts them in could honestly be solved by my 4 year old niece if I gave her the same amount of information the characters had.
I can’t go into the rest of the movie without ruining what little surprises it pretends to offer, but I can confidently say that they’re all pretty bad. You have your usual skeptics, last-minute help and heroic battle that telegraphs how it’s going to end about five minutes before it actually does.
The special effects genuinely try, but are found lacking. I ponied up the extra money to see it in 3D and discovered that you don’t need to watch this in 3D. The Lycans always look a little bit too CGI and what blood and gore there is tends to be over the top and silly, rather than adding any amount of realism to the fights.
“But what about the acting?” you ask.
“Get the fuck out of my house,” would be my reply.
Seriously, there have been 3 Underworld movies before this one. The acting was shitty in the one and a half that I saw, and I’m sure it was just as shitty in the other one and a half. It didn’t get any better. This could have been a silent film with about 10 sentences worth of subtitles and I would still have understood the entire plot.
All in all, Underworld: Awakening is a predictable, poorly CGI’d, poorly acted action movie. If you’re absolutely starving for some mindless werewolf/vampire homicide, then this is really all you have to tide you over until I finish my current film: Werewolves, Vampires and Zombies Kill Each Other For 90 Minutes (With The Occasional Onscreen Boob).
Sadly enough, Underworld: Awakening is still better than the prequel Underworld film of which I saw 50%, but if you’re looking for a GOOD werewolf movie, do yourself a favor and watch Dog Soldiers, a film that I cannot recommend enough. In fact, if you haven't seen Dog Soldiers, you'll be absolutely clueless when all the cool kids tell you to Spoon the fuck up. As far as vampire films go, I’m not a huge fan of the genre, but may I suggest some Pale Blood?
Your an idiot and have no idea what ur talking about.
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