“Underworld: Awakening”

“Under­world: Awakening”

By Bob Garver

Last week in my review of the lousy “Con­tra­band”, I wrote that Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary gen­er­ally con­sist of a mis­er­able slate of new releases. The prin­ci­ple is that if a movie were any good, it would be released in the sum­mer or near a hol­i­day where it could get a ton of busi­ness. Though it will dom­i­nate the week­end box office because there isn’t another fran­chise piece in sight, “Under­world: Awak­en­ing” is indeed a mis­er­able new release. The film is so bad that the sea­son could include three decent new releases and I would still con­sider it a dump­ing ground because it con­tained this one.

By my own admis­sion, it doesn’t help that I’m just now enter­ing the fran­chise. I have not seen the pre­vi­ous three entries (which came out in 2003, 2006, and 2009 respec­tively) which may explain why I can’t make sense of plot of this most recent install­ment. To its credit, he film actu­ally does make a valiant effort to catch me up with a nifty lit­tle pro­logue. I under­stood that Selene (Kate Beck­in­sale) is a 600-year-old human who fights on the side of vam­pires in their war against the were­wolves. I under­stood that the vam­pire elders betrayed Selene, which is why she’s less then wel­come when she vis­its a vam­pire coven mid­way through the film. I even under­stood her rela­tion­ship with a vampire/werewolf hybrid that pro­duced the hybrid daugh­ter she has in the film. But I did not under­stand Selene’s need to kill every­thing in sight, and for that I found the film to be point­lessly violent.

As the film opens, humans are try­ing to wipe out both vam­pires and were­wolves. A sci­en­tist (Stephen Rea) promises hope, although I’m not sure what he’s try­ing to cure exactly. Selene and her lover are try­ing to get out of the city, but in a crazy mix-up she gets cryo­geni­cally frozen for over a decade. Selene awak­ens to find that both vam­pires and were­wolves are nearly extinct and she has a hybrid daugh­ter whose DNA can be used to repop­u­late either race. Despite the betray­als in her past, Selene is still most loyal to the vam­pires, which makes the were­wolves the bad guys. Selene can­not let the were­wolves or the human sci­en­tist (who has nefar­i­ous pur­poses of his own) get ahold of the daugh­ter. And she kills hoards of peo­ple to make sure of it.

It was just last week in “Con­tra­band” that I watched Kate Beck­in­sale take a dis­com­fort­ing amount of abuse. I should find it enjoy­able that this week I get to see her dish it out. The prob­lem is that the char­ac­ter she plays is so poorly con­structed that I couldn’t even cheer for her. I just didn’t get the sense that half the peo­ple she kills needed killing. I hon­estly felt that some of the con­flicts she finds her­self in could be solved by talk­ing and try­ing to make sense of the sit­u­a­tion. But no, she needs to go right to the fancy knife­work. It should also be noted that the film is so dark and ugly that the action is hard to fol­low. We don’t even get too many good looks of Beck­in­sale in her skintight black suit, which is sup­posed to be one of the film’s major sell­ing points.

“Under­world: Awak­en­ing” is a mess, pure and sim­ple. The only rea­son to see it is if you absolutely have to see the movie that every­body else will unfor­tu­nately be see­ing. We’ve still got a lot of this sloggy sea­son to get through, hope­fully “The Artist” and “The Descen­dants” will get wide releases in the com­ing weeks and then you can treat your­self to two of the best films of 2011.

One and a Half Stars out of Five.

“Under­world: Awak­en­ing” is rated R for strong vio­lence and gore and some lan­guage. Its run­ning time is 88 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at HYPERLINK “mailto:rrg251@nyu.edu” rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Jan 23 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.