Underworld: Rise of
the Lycans
2009
D: Patrick Tatopoulos
**********
Pros: Some Good Lines, Bill Nighy
Cons: Bland Characters, Lack of Suspense from Foregone
Conclusion
Cracked.com
has a good article about why most prequels don’t work. One of the main points is that prequels
usually don’t have much suspense because we know the conclusion. Well, one could argue that learning how
something happened is still interesting.
Say what you will about the Star
Wars prequels, but the Original Trilogy did leave a lot to the
imagination. Underworld, however, didn’t just show us a story of its own, it
also showed us flashbacks which had the essentials of what would eventually
become this movie. Not only do we know
that its female lead, Sonja (Rhona Mitra), dies, we know exactly how and and why she died.
That’s not exactly a good case for spending $35,000,000 to make a movie.
The story
revolves around a typical forbidden love story between Sonja, a vampire
princess, and Lucian (Michael Sheen).
Lucian is born to a werewolf mother and was the first “Lycan,” a
descendent of the werewolves that could maintain his human mind and turn into
something that doesn’t look like a wolf at all.
At first I hoped that this movie might be more effective than the
previous ones because the protagonist would be more moral. While Lucian did lose points in Underworld by experimenting on humans to
find the Heir of Corvinus, this movie takes place 600 years before pulled that
stunt. While his motivation is understandable,
he invokes one of the prequel flaws described in the aforementioned Cracked
article. Lucian had a sardonic charm in
the first movie which was bolstered by Sheen’s performance. This makes sense after 600 years of fighting
a war, but here he is a young, hot-headed idealist. The movie had to make him bland to make
sense.
Meanwhile,
Sonja is a typical fairy tale heroine.
She’d rather go out hunting real werewolves (which look like William in
the previous movie), than tend to her responsibilities as a member of the high
council. She makes a vague claim at some
point in the movie that she “saved the Cullen” numerous times over, but she
needs to get saved by Lucian almost every time she fights. She and Lucian meet in secret to make love,
and when her father Viktor (Bill Nighy) finds out that they’ve conceived an
unborn child, he doesn’t hesitate to have her executed in front of Lucian, who
escapes with her amulet. I must say that
Sonja’s death is not as effectively sad as I expected. I was fully expecting her to be painfully
burned by the sunlight for a good minute, but she just goes up in CGI burns in
a second. I know I already saw random
vampires going out that fast, but I thought they’d ignore that to draw out a
sad death scene.
The movie
makes some small attempts to make Viktor seem like he loves his daughter and is
sad for the events, but he’s simply to crazy and evil to be believable in that
respect. As the ruler of the vampires,
he simply does what’s evil, not what actually makes sense. He brushes off the concerns of the humans
with which his coven is in a symbiotic relationship. When they confront him over failing to defend
them from werewolves as per their agreement, he straight up murders them. Nothing he does is remotely intelligent and
pragmatic. He’s just nuts. He even has Lucian tortured when the latter
rescues his daughter, just because he broke some minor rule in doing so. When the devious Andreas Tanis (Steven
Mackintosh) finds out about the relationship between Lucian and Sonja, he
avoids telling Viktor because he knows he’s the shoot-the-messenger type. One thing I can say for Viktor is that Bill
Nighy gives a very funny performance.
We’re not talking effective scenery-chewing ham, we’re talking
hilariously over-the-top ham. There are
people who actually think that his performance as this character is genuinely
good, and that astounds me. It also
helps that he has a couple good, snarky lines when he’s talking to vampire
advisor Coloman (David Aston).
Another effect of Viktor’s evil-over-logic
approach is the vampires’ treatment of the “Lycans” (I’ll just call them
Diamond Dogs from now on). Rise of the Lycans seems to contradict
some exposition in Underworld by
showing the vampires treating the Diamond Dogs worse than pack animals. And then they chain them up at the castle
walls during the day time and expect them to defend it from no-doubt pissed
humans who can attack during the day.
Lucian is often chained and treated with scorn. He clearly does not like his plight and feels
bad for the Diamond Dogs who get it worse than he does. Yet in the first movie, he exposits that he
always felt loyal to the vampires and served them happily until he fell in love
with one. That line suggested to me that
the vampires treated the Diamond Dogs with dignity and respect. They recognized their dependence on a loyal
group who could defend them during the day.
This is something I failed to mention in the first review: why are the
Diamond Dogs, who can walk freely during the daytime, losing a battle against
the vampires in the first place? Once
they learned to control their transformation, they can blend in with the
humans, whereas the vampires are helpless during the day. That’s a huge tactical advantage!
This plot hole is even more apparent at the
end of this movie, when Lucian leads an army of Diamond Dogs and werewolves to
successfully take out the vampires’ stronghold.
They kill almost everyone (while also murdering a great deal of
noncombatants), leaving a few survivors slink off on a ship. So how, after such a decisive victory, did
the Diamond Dogs start losing the war afterwards, and what happened to those
werewolves who were helping them? This
movie raises more questions than it answers, and it didn’t even answer anything
because everything was already answered in the first movie. At the end of the battle Lucian “kills”
Viktor by ramming a sword up his mouth and leaving him for dead. It would be a very well executed and satisfying
takedown, except we know that he survives it because we’ve seen him in Underworld. And to make matters worse, his real death in
that movie was pretty damn goofy.
And that’s what defines this movie: utter
lack of suspense. Virtually every
character that matters has a fate that we already know before we start
watching. We know Sonja dies. We know Lucian lives. We know Viktor, Tanis and Raze (Kevin
Grevioux) live. We know that Sonja’s
amulet will end up in Lucian’s possession and be used as a MacGuffin in the
series. The movie adds nothing to the
story of this series. This all makes Underworld: Rise of the Lycans one of
the most pointless prequels that come to mind.
I do, however, like the effective use of dialogue by Kraven (Shane
Brolly) and Selene (Kate Beckinsale) from the first movie used as a closing
voiceover.
MEMORABLE QUOTES
COLOMAN: The nobles are upset, My Lord. William’s pestilence has not been
checked. Werewolves have killed their
slaves.
VIKTOR: Humans upset.
Tanis, please. Take a note of
what pain that brings me.
COLOMAN: He is much of a disease as William’s
pestilence. You need to bring your pet
back.
VIKTOR: Thank you, Coloman! The obvious escaped me!
VIKTOR: I should have crushed you under my heel the day
you were born.
LUCIAN: Yes, you should have. [rams a
sword into his mouth] But you didn’t.
[final lines, used
from Underworld]
KRAVEN: I kept the secrets, and cleaned up the mess. But
he's the one who crept room to room that night, dispatching everyone close to
your heart. But when he got to you, he just couldn't bear the thought of
draining you dry. You, who reminded him so much of his precious Sonja, the
daughter he condemned to death.
SELENE: Lies.
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