After a three-year absence, the Underworld series returns in a desperate grab for the remaining table scraps left from the Twilight-fueled vampire vs. werewolf craze, trying its damnedest to remind people that, hey, before all the sparkly innocence of being on Team Edward and the soapy sleaze of True Blood, Kate Beckinsale was busy keepin’ it Goth, traipsing about in skin-tight black leather and pale-face makeup, suckin’ blood and wastin’ werewolves five whole years before the whole vamp v. wolf craze was co-opted by pre-teen girls and their disaffected moms.
Though Underworld has a niche following (lest they wouldn’t keep making these movies), there’s a reason this series never became the huge symbol of the trend it helped start. Sure, there’s the Goth aesthetic turning off a huge chunk of potential viewers, but the real reason is the lack of a story you can, pardon, sink your teeth into. These films are Gothic action flicks, and little more. Like The Matrix without the dime-store philosophy. Underworld: Awakening sticks to the formula.
Awakening skips over the Beckinsale-less prequel and picks up where number two left off. Selene (Beckinsale returning to the only steady gig she’s got) and the vamp/wolf hybrid Michael are on the run from a society that has decided that all non-humans are to be terminated. Don’t worry, any potentially brain-hurty allegory is solely confined to a few easily glossed-over images of vaguely fascist-looking storm-troopers busting down doors and such. When they are caught, Selene awakens to find herself captive for a decade or so in the future in a world where the “infected” are all but wiped out.
From there, the story is fairly rote and unfairly predictable, all in service to a blurry black-and-blue action beat every five minutes or so. An escape here, a car chase there, an infiltration, an escape, a showdown. You know the drill. At a lean 88 minutes that feels like even less, and with only two major locations, the $70 million budget still seems too high and under-used. That said, Awakening does boast some of the most inventive death-dealing in the series, not to mention one of the more disturbing life-resuscitations ever committed to 3D! Ugh.
