Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Bernhardt reviewed the 2022 Daniel Espinosa film Morbius. Today, he looks at the 2003 Len Wiseman film, Underworld. This article will contain spoilers.
Okay then. Underworld (2003), directed by Len Wiseman and starring Kate Beckinsale. The first film of five in the Underworld franchise. This journey begins, and it’s not a very promising one.
I like to start these columns out with something positive about the film in question and that’s a really heavy lift for this flick. It’s competently made — or that is to say, it’s made by competent craftsmen. This isn’t a BloodRayne situation where the end result doesn’t feel fully like a movie, or at least not one any of the crew would be happy putting their names on. But we’re really in a situation here where I’m reduced to the indignity of complimenting the female leads on what are mainly looks-based performances — and I can’t even equally compliment the male leads on similar grounds because they’re all such zeroes. It really is true that Beckinsale’s Selene sold this franchise single-handedly with that outfit and that face and hair presentation, and I do think the constant hair-over-one-eye beautiful porcelain mask aesthetic is as important to Selene’s look as the bodysuit, given that Wiseman is constantly holding long shots on just her face even — especially! — while other characters are talking. The second-most compelling character is Sophia Myles’s Erika, who punches way above her lightweight part in the script just because Myles is beautiful in precisely the sort of petty mean girl second-star way that informs the character, and in contrast to Beckinsale’s Selene, she spends the entire movie acting with her face in order to get over the various indignities that vampire court unlife have visited upon her. The third-most compelling character is Bill Nighy, absolutely sleepwalking through the villainous elder vampire role. No one else rates.
The male lead, Michael, is someone named “Scott Speedman,” and he is a total nullity. He has nothing going on. In fairness to him, he is woefully miscast; this man is a TV actor best known for being one of the male doctors on Grey’s Anatomy who isn’t the one everybody knows, and he’s across from a generational action movie leading lady. One suspects director Len Wiseman, who started filming this movie married to a kindergarten teacher and started filming its sequel married to Beckinsale, was perfectly happy with that arrangement. (Spare a thought for Michael Sheen, who walked onto the Underworld set in a relationship with Beckinsale and walked off of it firmly written out of it.) Speedman’s Michael is attractive in that straight male jock sense where it is almost entirely a proxy for, “Is he in very good shape?” This is a man that Selene falls in love with at first sight, whom Erika jealously covets as soon as she sees his picture, and who is constantly remarked upon by creatures of the night who have seen the passing of entire ages of young hunks for his rare beauty…and he looks like a slot receiver from the Bill Belichick Patriots. Secondary antagonist Kraven (Shane Brolly) has nothing going on either; Sheen’s charisma is excellent as you’d expect as the tragically heroic and tragically doomed leader of the werewolves, Lucian, but he is in a truly ridiculous redneck hobo hunter clothes-and-hair job. Who are we left with? A very young Wentworth Miller, who is in this movie for five minutes as Michael’s co-worker at the hospital? At least Miller tries to play the exposition scene where he compliments Michael’s surgical work in the locker room after their shift like he’s trying to feel out if Michael is gay, which is something from one of the men in this movie. Robbie Gee, the tech and gun vampire Kahn, basically only shows up to explain different types of ammunition and get killed.
This is part of a larger indictment of the film, which is that it doesn’t feel like a vampire movie so much as it feels like a rich guy paid a Hollywood studio to make a movie out of his 18+ kink-friendly Old World of Darkness larp. This is not a particularly novel observation, I’m sure; White Wolf, then-owner and publisher of the World of Darkness books, observed it so keenly they took Sony Pictures to court over it, and achieved a confidential settlement. But this is less about the specific things the script may have lifted from the sourcebooks or adapted outright from the Nancy A. Collins short story “The Love of Monsters” and more to do with what the film cares about and what it prioritizes. In the war between vampires and werewolves, both sides are cool sexy people who kind of just run around having drama with each other. They’re very similar, as you’d expect for people playing character types built on the same mechanical template; their biggest aesthetic difference is that vampires wear black synthetic pleather and fetish outfits, while werewolves wear brown overcoats with fur lining and work boots, and vampires are generally more attractive. Otherwise they are so alike that in the final act of the film when you’re getting pitched combat between the two factions across a series of sewer sets that all look the same, you have a hard time identifying which one is which until a werewolf decides to transform. The werewolf CGI, of course, is terrible.
Everyone is always in either actual combat or social combat, which is also very larp; the few moments this isn’t true come when Selene is getting an infodump from the Storyteller in the form of intrusive lore that completely skews any perception of time in the setting. The inciting events of the plot, the “death” of the werewolf leader Lucian at Kraven’s hands, happens some 600 years ago in the movie’s timeline but has the narrative weight of something that’s maybe a decade past, when Selene was a young girl instead of an adult woman. This is a big problem with the movie: The werewolves and vampires really do feel like player-characters and NPCs, and there is no one else in the game world. There is no “society.” There is no feeling that actual humans are out there on the rest of the planet, living their lives. Outside of the subway sequence to start the movie, the European city in which the film takes place — shot mostly in Budapest and sometimes London, but never named or given any character of its own — seems completely deserted. Vampires — and werewolves too! — are social creatures, and movie monsters only matter in the context of the humanity they exist to counterpoint. Here, they’re just various flavors of hot guy and hot girl. (This is still the unenlightened aughts, when women couldn’t yet apply to be nameless mooks and goons who get mowed down by the named characters, so there are no female werewolves in this film.)
The two most larp things about the movie are interrelated: One, the most important thing is fucking, especially forbidden fucking; two, the power gamers are constantly trying to see if they can get both the vampire and werewolf splat templates on their character sheets. It’s a very chaste movie for one so foundationally about sex; Erika and Kraven do finally kind of get down to business on screen once Erika decides to make her move to rule in Hell as vampire queen, but it’s goofy, clumsy, involves a lot of gyrating and fake neck biting, and at the end has a very funny “the books on the table block out any nudity” shot as Kraven leaves her in the lurch to go harass Selene some more. That’s also very larp, unfortunately — one guy is convinced he can get this girl to date him by hooking up with her character, he won’t let it drop, and someone’s going to have to get involved to let him know what the ground rules are. But the Storyteller for Underworld is out to lunch on this stuff, because he lets Michael have both the werewolf and vampire template, and this kind of special snowflake Sam Haight nonsense is no fun for anybody. Viktor (Bill Nighy)’s player gets it, but everyone else is way too permissive and it’s gonna lead to problems down the road for the playgroup.
One thing that isn’t very larp about Underworld is that everyone is using guns; like five different kinds of machine pistol appear in this film, but there’s nary a battleax to be seen. There are a couple decent arm blades, I suppose. Generally speaking when you larp you don’t want to be running around in public with anything that looks like a real gun, for the very obvious reasons you always don’t want to be running around in public with anything that looks like a real gun. But in the Hollywood remake of the larp, there’s no problem with everyone being tooled up with the latest from the Heckler & Koch armory — no problem, save that killing werewolves and vampires with Silver and Sunlight flavor-blasted bullets sucks! Come on! You can see dudes in leather get gunned down with bad CGI blood in basically every other action movie from 1999 to at least 2011; it doesn’t also need to be the main thing in the franchise about the vampire-werewolf war. This is where, and it pains me less to say this than I thought it would, Morbius gets it correct. The monsters in that movie get down with the appropriate tools for the job: super-strength, super-speed, and various supernatural bat-themed attacks. Here, the action is completely uninspired sub-Matrix also-ran stuff until the final showdown between Michael, Viktor, and Selene. That’s actually fine-to-good, if only because Michael’s hybrid form looks a lot like jacked Nightcrawler from the X-Men.
I usually try to recapitulate the story of the movies I watch for this column, but the amount of stupid meandering lore that was stacked on top of this paper-thin faux forbidden love soap plot left me irritated. It’s an incredibly simple story that constantly wants to derail you into talking about the politics of the vampire covens or the history of werewolf and vampire relations or why Kraven is so annoying every god damn second he’s on screen, so we won’t do that. Instead: This is the tale of a hot vampire and a hot werewolf falling in love and their various dads, uncles, and boyfriends getting mad about it. Except the werewolf dad, Michael Sheen, who also fell in love with a vampire a long time ago so he’s cool about it (for like two minutes, then he’s killed by irritating vampire boyfriend). The vampire dad, Viktor, isn’t cool with it, so Selene and Michael kill him at the end. Everything else on screen is a waste of time except the trials and travails of Erika, the pick me sorority girl vampire who is Selene’s…handmaid? Not really her friend. She wants Selene’s position as Kraven’s favorite mainly because Kraven is the head of the coven and she’s a political creature, and over the course of the film she gets increasingly frustrated by literally every other character’s inability to perform optimal — or even coherent — social climbing decisions. This is probably the only good character arc in the entire film, and her return in the next movie is the only thing about it that I’m looking forward to (this is probably a mistake).
Gotta be honest, this was a bad start to this five-film series. I’m very much hoping this is one of those franchises where the entries get “better” relative to their baseline as they gain more and more of an understanding of what they are, sort of like how the Resident Evil franchise, similar in many ways, found its level as Milla Jovovich-focused genre schlock. Otherwise it’s going to be a struggle keeping these on-topic, especially once we get out of the original trilogy.
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