While in captivity, werewolves are forced to undergo yearly medical exams.
The Film: Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009)
Director: Patrick Tatopoulos
Synopsis: (Spartacus + Romeo & Juliet) * (vampires + werewolves) + (½ * budget) = movie
This is a movie that was slightly unintelligible to me, because I haven’t seen the first Underworld and I don’t remember the second one. It begins with a brief voiceover just so you’re not totally lost, but for the most part assumes you’ve seen the previous films and are watching this prequel because you want to see the backstory fleshed out. Naturally, I can’t comment on whether it succeeded at that, but I can tell you that it more or less succeeds as a weekend afternoon B-movie. That’s not to say that it’s an especially good movie. You could easily sit in the theater with a Moleskine notebook and jot down a few pages’ worth of bad lines, nonsensical moments, plot holes, and so on. The gist is that Middle Ages vampires hold “lycans”—that’s werewolves—in slavery, with spiked metal collars that would impale them if they tried to shift. A fine plan—except that they’ve allowed Lucien, the first of this breed of lycans who can control when they shapeshift, and who they’re aware has incredible fighting prowess in human form, to learn to work with metal.
He makes a key.
Truly, this belongs among the annals of Great Moments in Supervillainry. In fact, Lucien uses a key to remove his collar three or four times during the film. At some point you’d think the vampires would just replace the collar with one that has no lock, and must be cut off to be removed. It’s not like they plan on ever releasing him anyway, right? So what we end up with here is a literal scrappy underdog story—call it Diet Spartacus—with Lucien eventually passing keys around and inciting a revolt. The werewolf uprising comes entirely because the vampires enslaved them and forced them into hard labor; many scenes of Lucien and other werewolves getting whipped are presented, but there’s never any deeper contrast of the two groups or of ideology. I’m not saying that enslavement is insufficient justification for a group to rise up against their oppressors; but Rise of the Lycans never makes an effort to reach any further for insight or allegory when the opportunities were clearly present. That’s not a travesty—this is just a B-movie, after all—but it’s the case nonetheless.
Arwen rea—erm, Sonja—readies her sword.
Ah, but of course, no Underworld film would be complete without Kate Beckinsale, right? Or, in this case, a vaguely Kate Beckinsale-esque female vampire played by Rhona Mitra. Most of the actors’ performances are passable, even surprisingly good at times (for a B-movie). While there were certainly some cheesy moments courtesy of the script, there were only a couple of times in Lycans’ compact 92-minute running time that I found myself rolling my eyes. No Oscars will be won here but I’ll say that on the whole, the cast was better than I expected. Bruce Nighy has a tendency to start chomping on the scenery a bit, but even he has some pretty good moments. Mitra, however, spends most of the movie looking bored, a sentiment I occasionally shared, so I can’t blame her.
With Rhona Mitra’s vampire heroine Sonja running around in Hollywood faux-medieval armor, and Lucien the werewolf taking center stage in the uprising plot, the stage is set for a riff on Romeo & Juliet, and they waste no time in getting to a steamy vampire-on-werewolf sex scene early in the film, which left me a little puzzled. It raises some obvious questions, which are further reinforced at multiple points later in the film when characters express shock at Sonja consorting with “an animal” or “a beast.” It’s really bizzare, and that’s all I’m gonna say on that.
I have to concede that Underworld: Rise of the Lycans surprised me and kept me mildly entertained for most of its running time, with occasionally earnest performances and some decent action scenes, given its relatively low budget. Room for improvement abounds in all areas—it certainly shows that you get what you pay for these days with CGI—and I doubt this is a film I’ll ever return to, but if you’ve got nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon, there are worse ways to kill a couple of hours.
