Five years ago, I watched Underworld: Awakening, which was the last film in the Underworld series. I remember leaving the theater and thinking to myself, “They really didn’t need to make this movie.” Well, imagine my shock when I saw the trailer for the new film Underworld: Blood Wars. I have no idea why they made this film or who asked for it, but here we are 5 years after the last film. The vampires vs. werewolves fad is well over, and that’s part of the reason this series fails to strike up any excitement about its new installments. Blood Wars proves that this series really doesn’t have any bite or bark left.
Directed by Anna Foerster from a screenplay by Cory Goodman (story by Kyle Ward and Goodman), Underworld: Blood Wars was produced by Lakeshore Entertainment and Screen Gems on a $35 million budget. It stars Kate Beckinsale returning as Selene, Theo James as David, Lara Pulver as Semira, Tobias Menzies as Marius, Charles Dance, and others. Runtime is 91 minutes (barely 80 without credits). Filmed in Prague, it opened internationally in November 2016 and dumped in the U.S. on January 6, 2017, grossing about $81 million. None of that changes how pointless it is.
Our film hits the ground running with almost no intro and a very short monologue from Selene that puts us right back in the war between Lycans and Vampires which is STILL raging on. It turns out that both sides want the location of Selene’s daughter who isn’t in this film at all, so if you didn’t watch the last movie, you already have no idea what is happening in this movie. Speaking of having no idea about anything, Theo James returns to the franchise I didn’t even know he was in to begin with. James plays David who is also looking for Selene’s daughter and together they…hang out for a while I guess.
The biggest problem you’ll find with Blood Wars is that the pacing in this film is all over the place. You can barely digest the plot because the movie is filmed like they have to finish it in an hour so they don’t miss the latest episode of Teen Wolf. There is even a point where the scenes and the dialogue are moving so fast that it feels like someone is fast-forwarding the film at 1.2x speed. The film is short; the running time outside of the end credits is barely 80 minutes long. The fact that they rushed through a lot of this movie with such a short runtime means they really didn’t have much to bring to the table.
There are essentially no good guys with either of these factions. Both the Lycans and Vampires are led by a-holes that spend their whole time double-crossing each other. The leader of the Vampires, Semira, is really mad at Selene for reasons because she hasn’t been in any movie before this one. She even double-crosses her own coven to get revenge on her because she is the bad guy. Meanwhile, on the wolf side, you have Marius who has also never been in any movie before this one who wants Selene’s daughter to use her pure blood to become a super werewolf or something and double-crosses his own team to double-cross the vampires.
There isn’t anything to this movie and this was my same complaint about the last Underworld movie five years ago. There is barely any content here to justify a feature-length film. Take out all the exposition and dialogue that goes nowhere, you have about 10 minutes of actual action which is not nearly enough for people who are going to see this only on name recognition. Hell, there is only one cool scene in this entire movie where David and Marius shoot at each other and neither one dies but that only lasts 10 seconds. There is more time spent showing off Rated R violence than giving you any characters to care about. The most important character in the plot isn’t in the movie and the main character is a broken shell of her former self. You have to ask yourself, who am I rooting for and why should I care about this film? Answers… No one and you shouldn’t.
Underworld: Blood Wars is a film that is 5 years past the 6-year point where people stopped caring for this franchise in the first place. If you can’t put together more than 77 minutes of a plot for a film, then just save your money for something else like a new Resident Evil movie… Blood Wars is a straight-to-DVD sequel pretending to be a big Hollywood release and the fact it was released in January, the graveyard of cinema, proves that. Don’t waste $12 and an hour of your time on this.
1/5
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