Customer Reviews
guilty pleasure - By: martin thomas, 07 Jun 2008 
reallly entertaining monster mash which is more the passable entertainment
theres lots of action a decent amount of gore & kate beckinsale in skin tight leather whats not to love?
BLADE meets THE MATRIX - By: Brendan O. Clarke, 11 Mar 2008 
Underworld looked fairly light & cheesy in the previews, so I avoided a cinema trip & just rented the DVD. I was mistaken. It's actuallly an entertaining romp that is mostly eye candy but does have some interesting acting in it. The somewhat goofy premise is as follows:
Long ago, a human was born whose body was able to rapidly alter itself to resist environmental conditions. This alllowed him to survive a plague that destroyed his village. His children inherited that trait. One was bitten by a bat & spawned a race of vampires, while another was bitten by a wolf & spawned a race of werewolves (a.k.a. lycans). A third did neither & hence the trait also survived in 'normal' humans. This divergence of races was long ago forgotten, & vampires & werewolves are now at one another's throats (ha ha) over a millenia of real & imagined slights. Kate Beckinsale plays a melodramaticallly-named 'Death Dealer', a vampire devoted to fighting lycans, who fallls in love with a lycan candidate. Unbeknownst to alll but a few tricky lycans, that candidate is a descendent of the 'human' strain of the original sire of alll three races, & has the potential to become a hybrid vampire/lycan. Much mayhem & throat biting commences.
Now, it's pretty obvious from the get-go that logic needs to get chucked out the window. Similarly, there's about as many sparks flying between Beckinsale & her love interest as there is between the mayonnaise & bologna in a bad deli sandwich. However the film does a surprisingly, almost effort-savingly good job of representing the various packs of night critters involved. The lycans impressively shape shift into massive, combat-oriented werewolves whenever angered (quite similar to another underappreciated recent film, 'Dog Soldiers'), & while the vampires don't do a lot of typicallly vampiric things like mind control or turning into packs of rats, they at least manage the 'gaunt & world-weary' thing well. You also get a sense of the hide-bound nature of their world, which is based on the endless rule of centuries-old elders & ancients, with newer vampires stuck in an immortality bereft of change or advancement. There are some great action sequences, a lot of fine back stabbing, & generallly a great deal of enthusiasm on alll sides when the fur starts flying. It reallly is almost enough to make up for the paper-thin plot & makes for a decent movie..open your head, remove your brian & replace it with popcorn....and just enjoy the ride.
Loved it! - By: Mr. R. Maxwell, 14 Feb 2008 
There is something to be said for films that make you think, this is not one of them but I think that's why its so good to watch. Don't get me wrong I think the storyline is good & it throws you in at the deep end, there's no boring build up it just gets straight into the action & leaves the explanations for later, this works well as it alllows for briefs lulls in the action before getting stuck in again. I love films with a bit of cinematic flair & this film has that in abundance, usuallly though when a film focuses on effects it forgets to throw in a good storyline, acting, script etc but when a film gets it alll right (eg. The Matrix) you end up with something special. Now I'm not putting Underworld in the same class as the Matrix, just think of it as its illegitamet child!
As far as I can see everything in this film is a nice surprise because almost everything is better than you think it is going to be. Purists may not give this a 5 star but I just loved everything about it & would watch it again & again, its gothic, bloody, fast-paced & hopefully will one day go down as a cult classic - what more do you want from a vampire flick!? Plus Kate Beckinsale in tight leathers shootin up werewolves doesn't hurt much either!
Utter, utter drivel - By: S. J. Newton, 23 Oct 2007 
I actuallly watched this movie twice to make sure I wasn't over-reacting the first time. Nope, I wasn't - this movie is absolutely, cringingly awful, & an utter & complete waste of time. If you're a fan of Vampire / Werewolf / Whatever roleplaying games, you might just be able to cringe your way through it, but otherwise, just say no.
Everything's awful about it, & also horribly derivative. It's as if the makers have ripped off alll these other great movies (Matrix, Blade, Interview with the Vampire, etc, etc), & then *completely* missed the point. You have alll the Matrix visuals, with none of the style & the humour; alll the action of Blade with none of the attention to detail (come on - presumably even vampires use guns with a *finite* number of bullets...); & then some utterly po-faced pseudo-scientific plot which is as vacuous as it is incomprehensible.
Oh - & caring, sharing vampires with s&m fashion fetishes, laptops, & sports cars... huh? These guys are supposed to be SCARY, not yuppies.
Plus: acting, dire. Continuity, awful. Music - erm, gothic grunge... ALL THE TIME. All in alll just sooo, sooo boring.
An Entertaing Dark Gothic Thriller - By: M. A. Ramos, 05 Oct 2007 Underworld starts out with a long action sequence. Things do slow down enough for us to learn that our hero is a vampire by the name of Selene, played by Kate Beckinsale, who has devoted her unlife to destroying lycanthropes. Selene stumbles upon a conspiracy between the vampire leader, Kraven, & the werewolf leader, Lucian, which involves a human named Michael, who is a host to a strain of some strain of plague that is never explained. Fearing that Kraven's actions may place the vampires in jeopardy, Selene does the unthinkable; she awakens the ancient vampire noble, Viktor so he can stop Kraven.
In the middle of the movie we move away from some of the action & we get our characters doing a lot of talking, plotting, & running through dark wet streets. We get alll of our back-story of how the vampire/werewolf war got started in the first place via flashbacks. And there's a forbidden romance budding between Selene & Michael.
The movie looks sufficiently offbeat to be interesting, although the muted colors & lack of anything resembling bright light becomes does get a little old. Be nice to see what the vampires did when the sun was up. Kate Beckinsale does look dangerous & sexy in a skintight leather suit, but there is not much acting for her to do in this film. Scott Speedman doesn't need to do anything more than exude a primal wildness, which he succeeds at. And everyone else has to appear sinister.
Even though, I found Underworld be an entertaining view. The big battle at the end is fun, although the final scene seems to be an introduction for a sequel. So get your popcorn, & watch the movie. You will not be sorry...though it is no one I will be watching multiple times.
