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 2012 Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein film Underworld Awakening. Today, he looks at the 2016 Anna Foerster film, Underworld Blood Wars. This article will contain spoilers.
Yeah, glad to be finished with all of this.
Underworld Blood Wars is perfectly inoffensive in the same way the best of this franchise’s films are — I think I’m swinging towards putting this and its predecessor, Awakening, up there as the best two, with Evolution (the second film) just behind them, then the original, and then five or six hard returns of empty white space before Rise of the Lycans. I am not sure the films actually get better in concept so much as they get away from Len Wiseman’s direction; Wiseman is actually quite bad at this whole action movie thing, especially the fight choreography and fight unit direction part. This entry, directed by Anna Foerster, certainly has the best fights of the bunch, which makes sense; between the last film and this one, a little picture by the name of John Wick came out and kicked the Western movie fight scene game square in the ass. I still wouldn’t call this a good film, or even a film you should watch for the fight scenes alone. It’s good to see a woman finally directing one of these, though a cynic might say that’s the surest sign that the boys’ club that made the previous four saw the writing on the wall that this franchise was just about dead.
We’ll change the format and start with the bad, actually, because I do have some nice things to say on the turn. The format for this movie, like the last one, is to spend the first act in a place, spend the second act going far away on a quest to a second place (and once again it is a secret vampire coven), and then in the final act return to the original place for a huge fight. In order to properly fit this act structure, stuff happens way too fast. In about thirty minutes of this 91 minute film, Selene (Kate Beckinsale) gets ambushed by lycans, saved by David (Theo James, welcome back), invited back into supposedly the last remaining vampire coven, put in charge of training its soldiers, and betrayed by the obviously devious Samira (Lara Pulver, who you may remember from True Blood or, more prominently in my mind, as Irene Adler from some truly execrable episodes of Sherlock, none of which was her fault). Add in the copious narration and scene-setting necessary to get the viewer up to speed on the complete vibe shift in the franchise that has happened offscreen between films yet again, along with the introduction of new werewolf antagonist Marius (Tobias Menzies, who looks like a discount Pablo Schreiber in the long hair here), and we’re rushing through a whole lot.
This first act also shares the same problem as previous similar fare in the series — vampire social machinations are boring and rote in this franchise, both because they’re happening against the backdrop of existential all-out race war and because they’re written by people who aren’t up for the task. Pulver and Bradley James, who plays Samira’s floppy-haired subordinate/lover Varga, are much better than the material their characters are handed; Charles Dance is back for seven minutes as David’s father Thomas to sleepwalk through dying at the end of the first act at Samira’s hand. (Many reviews at the time praised Dance’s work here; they’re guilty of their own brand of sleepwalking. Not every talented old Brit lowering himself to appear in slop elevates the material or delivers a great performance. There’s another 2010s vampire action movie that he’s much better in than these two Underworld films, and we’ll get to Dracula Untold eventually.)
If this sounds suspiciously like a recapitulation of the plot and themes of the first movie back in 2003, not the evolution of a story where humans have crushed all vampire and werewolf society after a secret group of lycan mad race scientists obsessed with blood purity and the perfect form infiltrated the world’s governments at the highest levels, well, yeah, we’ve forgotten about all that. The daughter from the last movie, Eve, has gone full no-contact with her mother for reasons that are not fully explained; the reasoning shifts between this being for Eve’s protection and this being a full rejection of a parent by her child as the pathos of the scene dictates. The search for Michael likewise has been quietly dropped. Clearly there are non-narrative commercial exigencies going on here; the studio has determined the obvious, which is that audiences want to see Selene in latex killing werewolves and vampires with guns and martial arts, and they do not care about the trials and tribulations of the love interest or this new kid. So they hit the big reset button all over again.
And on its own terms, that’s fine. Last movie was very Resident Evil-core gross monsters and clean labs action-horror sci-fi coded; Blood Wars zags where it zigged and our second act introduces a secret northern vampire coven full of white haired spider-worshipping elf-like snow vampires who fight with weapons and armor taken off a viking fantasy show’s backlot. In their castle they reveal the David is vampire Aragorn, the secret true son of the elder Amelia and the last true king of his line, even going so far as to give him his own magic sword of office that was held in trust for the day he’d return as man to learn the truth about himself. I actually really like part of the conceit here, not of the secret king twist itself but how it’s sold: Amelia also left him a signet ring with a drop of her blood in it, so that David can drink it and see her memories of him being born and have himself a good cry. Yes, it’s still very silly that vampires and werewolves have biological birth and aging, but while we’re no longer doing the “vampires are like mutants from X-Men!” superhero-adjacent coding from the previous movie, these are very clearly all magical fantasy creatures, not horror movie monsters, and this is the first time the blood-memory magical power has been used for something other than “go here for the next plot beat.”
When Marius and his lycans attack the northern coven we get a pretty decent fight, complete with some of the vampire kids getting ragdolled by the lycans and one of them stabbing a wolfman through the eye with an arrow before getting saved by Selene. Once again, “lycans attack a vampire coven to conclude the second act; Selene loses the fight and has to chase her foes back home for the final showdown in the third” is literally the same exact plot beat at the same exact time from the previous film, but it’s done better here in every way at least. There’s a subplot where Marius has a mole on the inside of Samira’s coven, a novice vampire death dealer that he’s sleeping with, our first example of an evil vampire and lycan couple in the franchise; it doesn’t really go anywhere because Samira disposes of her at the start of the third act just to remind you that she exists and is a threat, and to get a lesbian kiss on screen in 2016. Sure.
The roughest patch of the movie is the end of the second act and the first ten minutes of the third because Selene is out of play for them, wrapped in a spiderweb mummification cocoon to have visions of the “Secret World;” not much is explained about this new addition to the lore besides it giving vampires who undergo the process a new suite of speed and illusion superpowers. There’s a lot of housecleaning here with Marius, Samira, Varga, David, and the vampire council setting up the final showdown; as the studio no doubt had long internalized, every moment Selene is offscreen, you’re asking, “alright, where’s Selene?” When she arrives in the middle of the lycans storming the vampire coven antechamber like a much lower-budget Helm’s Deep, she arrives like Gandalf to turn the tide at the head of a host of northern elf vampire warriors, and she’s Selene the White now — her time in the cocoon has given her substantial highlights in her hair.
No reason to go blow by blow through the end here; David and Samira have the best fight in the movie, ending with David opening the window to the dawn outside, Samira basking in the sun’s rays to exult in being a daywalker now that she’s drunk Selene’s blood, and David taking the opportunity to just kill her the old fashioned way from behind. The Selene and Marius fight reveals that Marius is…actually a human? Perhaps he’s originally a lycan. Either way he’s been blood-doping himself with Michael’s blood after killing and exsanguinating him off screen to turn himself into a super-lycan bad ass. This is an extremely funny way to get rid of that character, and I imagine also very irritating to people actually invested in the lore of Underworld. You could have simply recast the character! Nothing was forcing you to get this stupid with it! Say he looks different because the tank messed him up! Hell, have Marius be Michael instead of just stealing his powers; I was fairly convinced that was where this was going to begin with. This fight is just Selene letting Marius tire himself out by beating on her for a minute straight, waiting for him to hit the taunt button to get his super, and then just teleporting behind him and ripping out his spine. Selene remains OP.
We get a lore-heavy outro about peace between all the peoples once again which I mostly ignored because let’s face it, if they ever went back to this franchise, those vampires and werewolves would be fighting again. I’m happy to leave this world’s future to whatever the stewards of this IP want to do with it, so long as it remains outside the realm of movies I have to watch for this feature. I’m sure Kate Beckinsale is relieved to have moved on with her life; without her, there’s no reason to further pursue this franchise, at least not down this timeline. I’m sure there will be a reboot eventually, though there hasn’t been any word on that for a couple years now.
After five of these films, the main takeaway I have from them is that the idea of a war between vampires and werewolves ultimately just isn’t that interesting. And given how many contortions of the premise they went through over the course of the franchise, I think the people who were making them quickly came to that conclusion themselves. Farewell, Underworld. Hopefully the next set of movies I watch will have less of an unseemly monomaniacal obsession with blood qualia. If you’d like input on that, you can head over to our Patreon, where patrons get to choose!
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