Vampires : Werewolves :: Sex : ???
Remember when vampires didn't automatically symbolize some aspect of sexuality, and werewolves weren't immediately translated into a metaphor for the hirsute ravages of adolescence? Yeah, me either. (Well, okay, Dog Soldiers, but who saw it?) That's why I couldn't resist Underworld. It seemed to hold out the promise, however faint, of monsters being monsters without all the psychoanalytic and/or sociological freight. Underworld gets this half right; it mostly sheds the once provocative and now routine interpretations the featured beasties have accrued over the past hundred years. Unfortunately, it doesn't find anything intriguing or even coherent underneath it all. The vampires are vampires, except they don't drink human blood and pack a lot of hardware. The werewolves can turn to wolves whenever they want to, not just at the full moon. Except they never do, and they, too, pack a lot of hardware.

The vamps and the wolves (or lycans, as the film calls them) are so well armed because they've been at war with each other for centuries. One wonders why customized guns are preferable to, I don't know, supernatural powers or something. Supposedly they've been evolving technology specifically designed to kill each other for hundreds of years now, but these new weapons seem even less effective than the cruder materials prescribed by folklore. It's like the AV club and the Young Astronauts are having a turf war, only no one has any batteries or rocket fuel. Also, there are a lot more long overcoats.

Fashion by... The Matrix
The prevalence of long overcoats proves to be a problem, as the opening fight sequence demonstrates. We follow our protagonist Selene into the subway, on the trail of the detested Lycans. Selene we can keep up with, because she's played by Kate Beckinsale in tight latex. But everybody else wears the same long overcoats and sprouts fangs in the heat of battle. It's hard to tell the wolves from the vamps, and just when one of the key players starts waxing recognizably lupine, he plunges mid-grapple into the shadows. Perhaps this is because the film's budget could only sustain so many full-blown wolf transformations, or perhaps it's because the director's acutely aware that he never gets the CGI quite right. Not only do the werewolves not seem to have enough fur to be werewolves; they don't seem to have enough fur to be mammals. They look like what the creature from Alien would look like if it had been bitten by a werewolf. But because, as stated earlier, they only rarely transform, they mostly look like everyone who's not Kate Beckinsale.

This inability to distinguish sufficiently between the warring clans plagues the screenplay as well. Selene hates the lycans, but she hates her particular coven of vampires, too, because it's run by the weeniest vampire this side of Buffy. Carrot Top would have been scarier, and not even for the reasons you'd think. Beckinsale conveys her displeasure by throwing open doors and striding through them huffily. Seriously, this happens about half a dozen times; I was waiting for a product placement touting a particular brand of hinges. Because Selene's allegiances, like everyone else's, shift in whichever direction requires her to pop off the most rounds at any given moment, you don't really develop a rooting interest in either side. So the ancient conflict doesn't seem to have much of a point.

What's the mutha effin' problem?
It would be easy to attribute this persistent confusion to incompetence, as a lack of basic cinematic skill surfaces in countless small details. There's the baddest of vampires, waking prematurely from six hundred years of slumber, intoning, "What's the ruckus?" Ruckus??! There's the transformation scene in the back of the police car where the cops turn on the radio at the crucial moment, presumably because it was easier to get rights to a song than it was to come up with convincing sound effects. There's even the big brawl between the baddest of vampires and the new uber-lycan, in which it's clear that the two combatants aren't actually touching each other, much less hitting each other. (Bob Uecker should do the DVD commentary: "Swing and a miss…just a bit outside!" and so forth.) But as it turns out, the confusion is by design. The lycans and the vampires are even more alike than we've been led to believe. See, it's all about a virus (uggh) and class struggle (double uggh). So much for checking the sociological baggage. And don't get me started on the worst "can you say sequel" final shot since Species.

So, how bad is Underworld? It's not unwatchable, but it's too earnest to be MST3K kind of fun. I had prepared myself for the possibility that Underworld would be too stupid to enjoy. Loath as I am to admit this, it is my duty to report that it is not, in fact, stupid enough.