Underworld: Blood Wars (2016) Review

Underworld: Blood Wars (2016) Review

 

The original creators of Underworld were not as involved in the production of the fourth movie, and the fifth movie had yet another director take over, but the series lead Kate Beckinsale returned, unlike the other lead actor in the first two movies Scott Speedman. Blood Wars begins with the usual recap, and we are told about a new lycan leader, but Selene doesn’t care. She is as done with the series as everyone else, which I found oddly refreshing…for a few seconds. Theo James’ character David from the last movie is back, still looking for Selene’s daughter Eve, and Charles Dance is back, too. It’s slow to start, but still more interesting and less terrible-looking compared to #4.

There is a new council of vampire elders who are boring and talk too much. They want Selene to train vampires to fight lycans, because the lycans are going to try to wipe them out once and for all with this new leader commanding them. It’s a decent setup for an ending with potential, but then Selene is betrayed and I guess it’s supposed to be a twist, but it just makes the story even less interesting than it already is. They try to frame her and take her blood, but Charles Dance and David save her. So now the vampires and the lycans are after Selene, and she just wants to be left alone.

I really don’t have as much to say about this one. There’s little that feels new, it retreads a lot of the same concepts (UV bullets, memory extraction via bloodsucking, etc.), but it is arguably better than Awakening overall. The action is fine, but not much different than what we’ve seen before, with a couple exceptions, such as when a lycan gets fully sliced in half down the length of its body. There’s still way more cgi than practical effects, but it doesn’t look quite as bad this time, though compared to earlier entries in the series it is still visually bland and repetitive.

There’s a bigger focus on the vampires this time, with a bit of expansion on the lore for both sides, but still nothing that tops anything previously established. By the time it got to the final fight I was tired of it and didn’t really care about what was happening, which is too bad because I would say this is the best-directed sequel since Underworld: Evolution. At least it feels more like the second movie than the previous one did, but if this does end up being the last movie in the franchise, it's too bad it feels so generic and forgettable. The story had just run out of gas, and the studio knew it. We don’t get the same kind of sequel setup ending as the other movies, and I think that’s for the best.

Underworld: Blood Wars is a totally underwhelming end to the series, and it’s the first one I actually don’t recommend on any level. Even though it isn’t as bad overall as Awakening, I think if you made it that far into the series you deserve to give it a rest. I didn’t get anything out of either movie.  

With six days of October remaining, there’s just enough time left to cover one more franchise in this year’s Sequel-a-Thon, and I made sure to pick something that would make for some entertaining reviews. It’s another series of films from Screen Gems, the same company behind Underworld, and was an even bigger success, combining action and horror in a similar way, but working from some source material (initially) that made it one of the earlier entries in the highly-troubled sub-genre of video-game-to-movie adaptations.