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 2003 Len Wiseman film Underworld. Today, he looks at the 2006 Len Wiseman film, Underworld Evolution. This article will contain spoilers.
You know what? For a bad movie, this wasn’t half-bad.
A whole lot of how you receive a piece of art (bad commercial art is still art) has to do with expectations, and vampire movies are no different. I had seen Underworld once when it came out and went back into the second viewing knowing I didn’t like it but not being able to remember why; it’s not a surprise I had the reaction to it that I had, though I maintain it is the correct reaction. I’d never seen Underworld Evolution, directed by Len Wiseman and starring Kate Beckinsale, and I went into it thinking, “Please, just lean into the genre nonsense and monster madness instead of having so much shooting in your action and so much talking in between it.”
In that respect, Evolution delivered! It’s still too long; all of these films come in like ten minutes short of two hours, which is ten minutes longer than they should be. I’m not a “films must be 90 minutes” evangelist like some; in my opinion, any two hour movie can be 90 minutes long if you exercise precise enough judgment. But there’s still stuff to cut here; that said, it’s nice that the stuff in question is “the action segment during the finale where Selene goes back to fighting werewolves for a couple minutes before the actual final boss fights start” instead of “every scene with Kraven in it.”
We’ll get to Kraven, and what I’m pleased to report about the scenes in this film with him in it, in due time; the movie opens with a scene set in 1200 AD Europe, as we’re informed by a title card using the most 2006 font possible for this job, Papyrus. I thought I’d complain about flashback scenes, but no, my thinking on this matter has changed. First: It’s much better to show us what’s happening here — the first vampire, Marcus Corvinus (Tony Curran) being coerced by last film’s antagonist Viktor (a returning and still-autopiloting Bill Nighy) into imprisoning his brother William, the first werewolf, for all time — than have Kate Beckinsale later narrate the goings-on in flat affect over a montage of her reading prop grimoires. Second: We get actual melee combat with swords and axes, as is proper in a vampire and werewolf monster mash. Third: This scene, set before all the other scenes in the film, is the first scene we see — and when we get “flashbacks” in the form of blood-reading visions, those visions are always happening within the present, instead of jumping back in time to give us a “true” version of what actually happened back then. The scenes of the film are presented fully in linear narrative order! In 2006, the television show LOST has not yet fully stolen this technology from us!
The plot of the film is very simple: The first vampire and the first werewolf want to team up and enslave the world, and Selene and whatever werewolf Nightcrawler is named have to stop them. Scott Speedman spends most of this movie in the hybrid form getup and it makes him like twice as interesting as a character. My apologies to all the Felicity fans out there who wrote in to complain about their boy actually peaking as a television actor much earlier than his time on Grey’s Anatomy; I was and remain unfamiliar with his game. Anyway, Markus woke up by having werewolf blood spilled into his elder vampire coffin in the final scene of the first movie and in the four in-world hours between the two films became a monstrous coolguy vampire/werewolf hybrid, now focused solely on freeing his imprisoned wolf brother. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense given what we were told about Markus in the first film, but all that stuff sucked, so just roll with it. Any problems I had with the internal consistency of the lore here were wiped away when Markus turns into a flying demon lord and kills Kraven as his introduction into the film. Hell yeah, get rid of that guy. Use your crazy vampire wing-spines to turn his head into a red mist. Markus, you are now my favorite character in the film.
Eventually he starts turning back into a mortal for talking scenes with the same “second guitarist from a metal band” aesthetic that a bunch of the men in this franchise have, but until then I have to say that the film is B-movie-grade cooking. It helps that Markus is chasing Selene and Michael (had to look it up; originally went with Matthew here in the first draft) through forests and lumber towns and winding mountain paths instead of the extremely boring empty city streets that hosted every action scene in the first film. There’s a break in the action in here for a sex scene between our two heroes, and it’s a reminder that films used to have these and they were occasionally well-done. The Underworld sex scene between Erika (sadly absent from this production except for one frame of blood memory flashback) and Kraven was goofy and chaste and felt like two theater kids in a high school production doing what they thought vampire sex was for a play; here we’ve got both actors naked doing by-the-numbers PG-13 romance movie vanilla sex, no prohibited nudity but a lot of e.g. Selene’s tummy and Michael’s ass to compensate. It’s nothing special and you can probably still show it on basic cable, but there’s some actual feeling here besides, “Oh, brother. I guess it’s kind of funny that the vampire books on the table are blocking her chest.” Len Wiseman got a lot better at directing sex scenes now that the actress involved is his wife! We’ll move on without examining that any further.
We have two woodland safehouses in the first half-hour, and who doesn’t love a good woodland safehouse, especially when it gets immediately hit by either an angry shirtless winged demon lord or a black helicopter tactical team? Yes, the logical third faction in any vampire vs werewolf war is finally here — the human monster hunters, the crew that should actually be wearing tactical gear and using silver nitrate bullets and UV flash grenades. Finally, some order is restored to these proceedings. This specific group of hunters work for Alexander Corvinus, father of Markus and William, a coward and sentimentalist who has been given the gift of eternal life and has become so paralyzed by it that he and his organization are a completely ineffectual sideline to the war between the greater powers. The writing here isn’t great (that description actually gives the character more credit than the script does, because it fumbles the link between Corvinus’s long life and his inability to act, even though it’s clearly there as a throughline) but Derek Jacobi is in to play Corvinus and I was so happy to see him. It’s really hard to beat Derek Jacobi as your principled coward who gets four scenes and then is brutally murdered in the fifth.
This second act is when we make some unfortunate pit stops to service the lore and worldbuild a little, though thankfully the film routinely cuts to Markus killing people or animals to spice things up. It turns out Selene is the key to locating William Corvinus’s prison, because her father was the architect who built it and her family was killed by Viktor to keep its location and function secret after it was completed. As established in the previous film, Viktor was supposed to kill Selene too, but having just executed his original daughter for screwing a werewolf, he decided he’d like to have another one; this was the original film’s stab at either Greek tragedy or dramatic irony. Here it works in the plot’s favor such that Markus can crash her conversation with his dad, “kill” Michael, and drink some of her blood to learn the location of her family home, where the prison was built. Selene drinks the dying Alexander’s blood in order to transform herself into a hybrid (the mechanism on all this is basically that Corvinus blood lets you add supernatural templates to your character sheet coming or going, and any more specific explanation is just a handwave), and we’re off to the finale.
Once again the standout star here is vampire lord Markus; the joke of William Corvinus being a white wolf in the movie that came out after Sony settled a lawsuit with White Wolf Publishing over the original Underworld isn’t lost on me, but frankly Wiseman and his team don’t have any great ideas for how to do werewolf fights with the tools in their toolbox. There’s a lot of jumping and claw slashing, some biting, but nothing as cool as when Markus and Selene get down to business in front of a crashed helicopter’s big spinning rotor and she kills him with his own spines followed by a swift push into the gib machine. Markus’s winged demon lord form in this movie does a whole lot with his spine-tentacles — they’re very of a piece with the spines that Kerrigan gets in the StarCraft video games after being brought over to the Zerg Swarm, and it’s fun to see that concept get some run in a monster action flick. Anyway, Michael gets a plot resurrection so he can participate in the ending; our heroes kill the bad guys and kiss; Selene gravely monologues that they’re planning to do another film; credits.
I suspect this is going to be the high water mark for the franchise, though I’d love to be proven wrong by the next film having an even better vampire monster running around killing half the characters that are named and almost every single one that isn’t. I think after the next one these movies start being prequels, which at least means fewer guns. We’ll see if I’m as upbeat at the end of next week’s column.
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