Movie: Underworld
Genre: Action
MPAA Rating: R for Gory Violence and Language
The “No Spoiler” Summary:

Six centuries ago in England, a feud between the Vampires and the Lycans (known as werewolves) raged with a motive that was eventually forgotten as generations carried the bad blood.

The warfare dwindled until modern day, when a female vampire Celine spies on two Lycans following a normal male above ground. As she follows to kill them, she stumbles upon the Lycans’ underground lair, and reports the location to the vampire headquarter, a gothic mansion, where her peers and leader doubt her claims.

Being curious, Celine tracks down the male, Michael Covin, and falls in love. The Vampires rejected his welcome at the mansion, and the bond they developed disrupts the powers between the two species, because Michael was a long awaited target of the Lycans, which they destined to convert him to a werewolf.

In amidst a quandary, Celine awakens Victor, a Vampire Lord who is to lay dormant, to seek answers. Although awaken a century ahead of schedule, the Lord pardons her since she presented proof of the Lycans’ lair and existence of their leader. She also ends up discovering the reason for the ever-raging warfare, which places her in greater quandary.

Geetarman’s Critique:

The film has a rather subdued and unoriginal storyboard, with generally expectable plots and sequences that will most likely become overlooked by the average popcorn-movie watcher, as the film is filled with action scenes to strategically entertain the masses. A few twists are implemented as hopes to spice up the story, but only to cause discrepancies and some mess. Also, the style and anecdote seems a bit too similar to Blade, an older Vampire-busting film featuring Wesley Snipes, but this time with a weak love story twist.

Character developments of the main players of the movie are a bit too weak to establish anything noticeably strong about anything except for their visually striking guise, but the environment setting of the underworld is a rather effective, even a bit believable, utilizing subway tunnels and old abandoned subway stations.

Many of the action sequences, although in some scenes seem to appear nicely shot, falls short of high talent because it is unoriginal. Many of the styles are borrowed from The Matrix, Blade, and even Terminator 2. And some scenes are messily shot to where it becomes a bit incoherent.

There is absolutely nothing creative as far as art for cinematography; the direction shot is insipidly executed with no subtle meaning behind every shot. The photographic style, also done to fit the genre, is also taken from Spielberg’s technique of removing the orange hue from faces and hands and converting the picture to cold and dark blush hues, done similarly in Minority Report, so that everyone (even an Asian dude in the movie) would appear ghostly white. Even the money shot for the poster is bitten from the bicycle silhouette against the full moon in Spielberg’s Extra Terrestrial. Furthermore, the title “Underworld” is already taken by an earlier movie.

No matter how cool the characters might look and how action-packed the fighting sequences are, my consensus is that this film is so good at being a biter, that you will have sworn you’ve seen it once somewhere else before, or maybe even a couple of times over. Geetarman gives it a D+.

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