Underworld: Awakening

The very best thing I can say about “Underworld: Awakening” is that it’s visually luxurious. Like its three moody predecessors, it’s dark and gothic, taking place mostly at night time (for logical reasons). It features many action sequences, all stylised to high heaven, a la “The Matrix,” and all decidedly cool and awesome. It also maintains the metallic blue tint that director Len Wiseman heavily decorated the first film with. Now, that’s all well and good, but the problem is this: “Awakening” is the fourth instalment in the “Underworld” franchise, meaning we’ve seen all this three times before – surely by now this franchise should really be thinking about relying on something outside of stylish visuals, and by that I don’t mean slapping 3D onto the damn thing.

“Awakening” sees Kate Beckinsale returning as Selene, the pale-faced vampire warrior clad in a tight leather catsuit and armed with silver-plated bullets and silver spinning thingies. If you’ve been following the horror-action series, you’ll know that the third instalment, prequel “Rise of the Lycans,” did not star Beckinsale or her character (although it did oddly star a Beckinsale lookalike as another character). This one, however, continues Selene’s story from the first two films, taking place twelve years after the first sequel, “Evolution.”

At the film’s beginning, we are shown that the human population is now very much aware of the existence of vampires and Lycans (which are werewolves, basically). Both are fiercely hunted by the government, leading to the supposed extinction of the Lycan race. Both species, however, have left quite a scar on human society, with many now dead after attacks resulting from the species’ widespread discovery.

Selene and her vampire-Lycan hybrid lover, Michael, have been captured by the humans. After twelve years of being trapped in a state of cryogenic suspension, Selene finally breaks out of her frozen prison and, in a sequence resembling a scene from last year’s “Resident Evil: Afterlife,” effortlessly breaks out of the high-security research facility in which she has been imprisoned. That same night, there is another break-out from the same facility, this one by a 12-year-old girl, Eve (India Eisley, “The Secret Life of the American Teenager”), whom Selene discovers is not only a vampire-Lycan hybrid, but is also her very own daughter.

So, Selene must go on the run and protect Eve from two groups: on the one hand, there’s the organisation which captured the two of them and wants to use Eve to develop a cure against vampirism, and on the other there’s the not-quite-extinct Lycans, who have somehow managed to create a Lycan that is, as Selene observes, at least twice the size of any she has seen before.

The first two films in this mostly clunky franchise were directed by Len Wiseman, an art director turned film director; he is also Beckinsale’s husband. This time round, Wiseman serves only as a producer and one of the four screenwriters, the direction taken over here by Swedish filmmakers Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, who previously gave us supernatural horror “Shelter” in 2010. Here, Mårlind and Stein do a good job of copying Wiseman’s visual style, but do a very bad job at just about everything else.

With “Awakening,” the two directors deliver buckets of gore and a boatload of CGI, as one would very much expect from the franchise. The action is frequent and very over-the-top, with meaningful dialogue shoved to the side in favour of blood-soaked badassery. The Lycan effects are rather good, as is the stunt work. Beckinsale, as always, is perfectly fine in the leading role, doing a good job with what she’s given. With all of this in place, I believe hardcore fans of the series will get a kick or two out of the film; us non-fans, however, will just have to suffer through the whole thing.

I read that Beckinsale wished for this film to be more than just “lots of explosions and people running around in tight clothes.” “You really want to see stakes that mean something in these kind of movies,” she stated. By “stakes,” I assume that she is referring to the inclusion of the daughter character in the middle of all this gory violence, which actually raises the biggest problem with the film, and indeed with its predecessors: we don’t care.

We, as an audience, don’t care. Why should we care? We are given no reason to care, and thus we don’t. We don’t care because there are no characters in the script. There are walking cadavers leaping about and firing guns, sure, but there are no characters to help us become the slightest bit engaged in the plot. Why should we care about a bunch of stone-faced bloodsuckers who are entirely drained of any semblance of personality? Why should we care about their stupid little war with the equally insipid Lycans? Throwing a 12-year-old girl into that mix and placing her in a position of danger doesn’t suddenly make us care; why should it when the girl is as vacant and dead-eyed as everyone else in the film?

And from this, “Underworld: Awakening” becomes a dreary, boring experience that is exhausting even halfway through its 85-minute length. Sure, it may throw stuff at the camera, it may be loud, it may have bone-snapping and throat-tearing, and it may have Kate Beckinsale running around in tight leather, but it is not fun or thrilling, much as it believes itself to be; it is instead a chore to watch, and honestly, much as it pains me to say it, I’d rather be watching “Twilight.”

3/10