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 2006 Len Wiseman film Underworld Evolution. Today, he looks at the 2009 Patrick Tatopoulos film, Underworld Rise of the Lycans. This article will contain spoilers.
Oh, so it’s going to be like that, is it, Underworld franchise? After I had such relatively nice things to say about the last one of you? Let’s get this over with.
Underworld Rise of the Lycans is a completely superfluous ninety-minute recapitulation of Lucian’s flashback at the start of the third act in the original film, when he reveals to Matthew or Michael or whatever his name is that he, too, once loved a hot vampire babe. That dalliance with the original biological daughter of Viktor (Bill Nighy, led to her being burned at the stake at sunrise as he was forced to watch, a sequence which is refilmed for this picture with additional Bill Nighy-at-40%-of-his-power gesticulating. The plot up until that point is incredibly perfunctory TV-grade writing and acting with the sole goal of dragging us to that particular finish line; afterwards, Rise of the Lycans immediately turns its eyes towards setting up the events of the first film which, again, because this baffled me the first time this came up in the franchise, will not occur for another eight hundred years.
It’s not that prequels are prima facie bad in terms of craftsmanship. I’m sure there’s a prequel out there somewhere that is on its own merits a good movie, though an example of such escapes me at the moment. (Does Fast Five from the Fast & Furious franchise count?) The problem with prequels is that they are fundamentally ideologically compromised. They exist only to tell you the story that happened before the story that you already know and which they can only ever exist in reference to. Fast Five, if it counts as a prequel to The Fast & The Furious Tokyo Drift, does so mainly to set up how Han ends up in Tokyo where he eventually not-really-dies. The connection there is so tenuous, however, that the Fast Five movie is allowed to just do its own thing for the entire rest of the runtime that isn’t Han musing about ending up in Tokyo eventually while driving off on his motorcycle with Gal Gadot’s character; it’s not like Tokyo Drift had, as a major third act revelation, Han talking about the bank job he pulled in Rio a couple years back.
This plot, therefore, is barely worth any detailed blow-by-blow. This is essentially a “blacksmith slave boy falls in love with the princess, and their star-crossed romance is destroyed by the evil king” story with some superpowers thrown in. The franchise has reached its absolute nadir in terms of caring about either “vampire” or “werewolf” as a distinct class of monster; there are three different kinds of werewolves running around by the end of this thing (the mindless William Corvinus type, the original-flavor Lycans, and the ageless super-Lycans that Lucian and his eventual crew in the first movie represent) and the distinction really doesn’t matter at all because a lot of it is just an excuse to paper over that 800 year change in tone and setting when this franchise’s tabletop campaign goes from the Fantasy ruleset to the Modern ruleset. Viktor’s daughter Sonja (Rhona Mitre) is first shown as a child vampire when she locks eyes with child werewolf Lucian for the first time, and then both grow at the same rate into adults. That’s weird! It was implied in the first film that Viktor turned Selene as a child and she grew into an adult vampire, but in the second film we see that she was turned as fully-adult Kate Beckinsale; I guess we’re back to vampires experiencing biological growth processes in this film. And hey, Lucian manages to get Sonja pregnant here, the one new even slightly-relevant piece of information this movie provides for this story that the first movie did not. Frankly, I wish it hadn’t pulled that particular trigger, because if we’re introducing hybrid babies it’s pretty clear where all this is headed once we come back to our heroes in the present.
Michael Sheen is back as Lucian, with this project notably lacking either Len Wiseman or Kate Beckinsale’s involvement in principal photography — the film is directed by Patrick Tatopoulos, the French-Greek production designer for the previous two Underworlds, whose other directorial credits are two Coolio music videos in 2000-2001 and a TV movie gig he got after this feature debut. Perhaps there’s some other story behind him being the guy in the chair on set for this film instead of Wiseman that isn’t the obvious one, but it doesn’t immediately present itself. Rhona Mitre’s Sonja is done up to look exactly like 1200 AD Selene to the point that even as someone who knows what Rhona Mitre looks like, I had to go double-check the cast list. I’m not what you would call a Michael Sheen “guy.” I know a lot of people are; it’s fine, I can see why, but I’m not really on board. He’s perfectly adequate here but he’s got a nerd face that’s much better-suited for playing the angel from Good Omens, or Tony Blair. Neither he nor Bill Nighy, the two actors asked to actually work in Rise of the Lycans, are handed suitable material with which to do their jobs. They do them anyway, as overqualified British actors have done in American productions for generations now. What else. Kevin Grevioux returns as Raze, his bruiser character from the first film, which I liked. Grevioux isn’t good, but then he wasn’t good the first time around, either; it’s just nice to see a familiar face. Stephen Mackintosh also reprises his previous role of Tannis, the sex dungeon-having exposition guy who gets murdered by Markus near the end of act two in Underworld Evolution. As some variety of Briton, he’s far more suited for this stiff, sniffly majordomo role than he was for the second film’s lore dump fuckboy take on the character, but this runs the risk of making the roles and performances sound more interesting than they actually were in either film.
I would not say that I had high hopes for the action in Rise of the Lycans, but I was interested in seeing what they’d do for a full film without access to guns. There was the uptick in sword combat I’d hoped for, yes, but two things kept that from headlining this as a pure improvement (three things, if you count “the sword combat action scenes weren’t very good”): Too many crossbows, and too many werewolves. The problem with the former is obvious — they just replaced all the damn guns with repeating crossbows or ballistae. Cowards. The problem with the latter is mostly to taste, which is that unarmed shirtless white guys (and Kevin Grievoux) doing leap- and swipe-based power move combat is extremely boring, visually speaking. Sonja gets a couple kinda-decent sword fights before she goes out, but all the Lycan stuff is pabulum.
“All the Lycan stuff is pabulum.” Yeah, that just about sums this one up. We’re going short this week, but the material deserves it. Two more of these things. Maybe I’ll have more to say about the next one.
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