#Underworld blood wars 2016 movie movie

None of the sequels have clarified or simplified things. The desperation in the Underworld franchise kicked in somewhere before the end of the first movie.

#Underworld blood wars 2016 movie movie

The movie is confusing, but mostly because it’s so damn difficult to pay attention or get invested. It’s all pretty simple, backed by just enough needlessly convoluted backstory to give off the illusion of being complicated. It’s just a bunch of exhausted actors spitting out words that they don’t understand written by writers who didn’t care. This franchise has played out almost side-by-side with the equally inexplicably unstoppable Resident Evil series, but sadly never embraced its inherent silliness with tongue-in-cheek camp like those endless zombie flicks. You know, the same old crap that didn’t make much sense in the last four movies and doesn’t make any more sense here.Īs always, Underworld: Blood Wars treats everything deathly seriously to the movie’s detriment. There are some vampire politics involved and the threat of war. It just means that Beckinsale is caught in the middle again with the vampires and werewolves all wanting to kill her and track down her daughter. Instead, Beckinsale is approached by the vampire counsel (including an underused Charles Dance) to help fight off a new army of werewolves, but the truth is more complicated. This time that daughter of hers with mixed monster magic blood (don’t ask) has been sent away for safety to avoid the overall messy narrative of Underworld from advancing significantly. So Kate Beckinsale’s “Death Dealer” vampire warrior is back. Unfortunately, that’s not how reviews work, I’ll try for a bit more. The easiest way to explain what any Underworld movie is about is to sum it up with a single word: nothing. Here comes the next one and it’s about as good as the last one, which is to say, “not very.” Yet the movies keep making money, so sequels keep getting produced. It feels like posturing, the product of folks who understand the commercial appeal of genre entertainment but not why the stories are worth telling.

Yet from the very first entry, the Underworld movies have been a boring and convoluted mess.

It’s got guns and blood and sexiness and mythology and monsters and all sorts of other things that typically make for ADD entertainment. The concept sounds like a can’t miss geek fix. Underworld: Blood Wars is somehow the fifth flick in this never-ending cycle of pretty people wearing leather caught in a war between vampires and werewolves. You’d be hard pressed to find a single person who admits to liking them, yet they continue to be massive successes. The Underworld movies are kind of like Nickelback.