Review of Underworld: Blood Wars (2016) by Filipeneto — 15 Jul 2020

This was the fifth film in the "Underworld" franchise and marks a new disappointment after the film that precedes it has registered a rather relative qualitative improvement. In fact, if the previous film looks less stylized and seems to make a more consistent bet on the cast's work, this film will make a clean slate of it all. In fact, the feeling I had is that the film even makes a clean slate of everything that happened in the film before and pretends that it never existed: in this film, we hardly hear about the Purge or the wars between immortals and humans, and humans virtually disappear.

The action takes place years after the events of the previous film, and they seem to copy a lot of material from the first two films: again, we have an escalation of the war between vampires and a resistant clan of lycans that vampires deemed virtually on the verge of extinction. Again, we see Selene running away to save herself and showing up to save the day in the end, being betrayed (again) by vampires she thought she could trust. That is, the script is so similar to the first two films that it appears to have been chewed and pasted.

The film was directed by Anna Foerster, in her first cinematographic work of direction (she had directed other works, essentially episodes of TV series). She proved not to be very experienced but that is not a defect. What is very bad is that she consented to the terrible script that Cory Goodman presented to her. He practically plagiarized the first two films.

The cast continues to be led by Beckinsale, but she is not doing any more good here. She is an action figure designed to look sexy, and nothing more. She does not move a muscle and does nothing well. But what shocked me the most was the dubious way in which her character reacts to her daughter's absence... on the one hand she cares and seems determined to protect her but, on the other hand, she shows total emotional detachment. Does not make sense. Theo James is the best actor in this film, and even he has gross flaws on several levels. Charles Dance is good but is removed early, Lara Pulver is uninteresting and Tobias Menzies is histrionic and ends up being misused.

Technically, it continues to bet on the incredible action scenes, overwhelming CGI and effects. There is virtually nothing positive that this film can rely on. Cinematography is horrible with the undisputed predominance of blue and gray. Its impressive but it does not move us. Death after death, persecution after persecution, everything just seems absurd.