Review: Underworld: Awakening 3D

Underworld: Awakening 3D, despite its ungainly and trite sequel-standard This: That titling, despite being the fourth outing in a horror-action franchise that was getting wheezy by minute 91 of the first flick, despite being a last-gasp of 3D outing fully enmeshed in that technology’s en-murkifying optical cruddery, despite almost everything the film has going against it, it somehow manages to be… pretty OK.

Fans of Beckinsale’s vampiric death-dealer Selene (and they’re legion, the Underworld franchise being one of the more inexplicably, enduringly popular ones of the past decade) will love it, and it’s almost good enough to win over new converts. That’s saying a lot, these days. Sure, it’s no Fast Five, but it’s made with enough care and enough enthusiasm that it ends up being entertaining. That that’s surprising is depressing, but here we are.

Ditching the historic mode that the third film went with, U: A instead catapults us 12 years into the future, when vampires and their mortal enemies the lycans have been all but scoured from the Earth after the humans learn of their existence and then annihilated them using special bullets. Woken from deep cryo-sleep by an unseen ally, the vampire-ninja sex-warrior Selene finds herself in a world she “doesn’t recognize” – mostly, I’m assuming, because it’s very dark and rainy all the time and she probably can’t see anything, though she wasn’t wearing dimming 3D glasses so who knows. Searching for the love of her life, the vamp-wolf hybrid Michael, she is instead delivered of  a living weapon that would let, should she fall into their hands,  the near-extinct lycan race rise snarling from the ashes.

 

Sure, it’s not doing anything new. Yes, it suffers from all of the same drearinesses that marked the first couple of outings – a heroine who seems psychotically devoted to fighting in a lycra/corset/chunky goth heels combination and is prone to Duran-Duran-videoesque moments of dramatic alleyway posing, for example. Its visual palette has all of the colours crossed out and “dark and wet” written underneath. It’s creators still display a penchant for surrounding its action scenes with not-very-good-and-kind-of-too-long “lo let me speaketh of the proud battle clan of Vampire house of nobility werewolf lore blah blah blah” scenes.

All of that said, though, it has a really cool monster that shows up at a pivotal moment in a scene that’s actually kind of suspenseful and gripping, it has a heroine in Selene that actually seems both vulnerable and tough, and it has a climactic final battle that’s staged with more thoughtfulness and visual inventiveness than you’d expect, and all of that, in these latter days of low genre expectations, is enough for it to actually be pretty… well, if not good, then at least pretty alright.