Another day, another movie, and today, it's Underworld: Awakening, the fourth in a series of vampire-vs.-werewolves popcorn movies. I enjoyed the first two of these, with their essentially sci-fi take on the monsters of Central European mythology, and their stylized setting - ruthlessly elegant vampires and grungy disgruntled werewolves, framed in the moody, anonymous modernity of cityscapes and wastelands, though I have to admit that I skipped on the third film, a critically-panned but reasonably profitable medieval prequel.
The biggest thing this series has going for it is Kate Beckinsale as the werwolf-hunting vampire Selene - she looks incredibly good in a rubber catsuit, whether she's crouching, fighting, putting on a coat, or being thrown into a wall - I suspect she'd also look good in that outfit if she was asked to fry an egg or replace a car exhaust, though sadly this film doesn't ask her to do those things; equally importantly, she can also put a good deal of emotion and poetry into her performance, even though she's unlikely to be taking this role terribly seriously - but then again, she married the man behind the series and became his muse, so you never know.
Either way, this is never going to be Shakespeare, but Beckinsale lifts this movie a long way past what it would be without her.
Alongside our heroine, there's top-drawer support from Charles Dance as a vampire nobleman, replacing Bill Nighy's Viktor from the previous movies - they've run out of flashbacks they can use him in, and I suspect he's too expensive these days. Dance brings nobility, dignity and paradoxical strength to the role of a character who's basically a coward or a quisling, without the overdose of theatrical absurdity (however appropriate it might be) that he's displayed in some of his previous roles. Like Beckinsale, he's a real pleasure to watch.
It's to these two actors' credit that they kept this movie interesting (and an honourable mention also goes to the underrated, untypecast Michael Ealy). Awakening retains the stylistic mood of its precursors, but it has an odd abstraction about it that I didn't notice before - the high-rise cityscape and references to the "feds" suggest America, but the film is set in a country with Russian attack helicopters, European cars, and foreign numberplates; certain details, like the old-model Volvos on the streets and the boxy computer monitors in the police station, even give the setting a slightly 1990s feel, which only adds to the sense of artificiality.
In fact, the stylization of the setting resembles a computer game, and the plot, such as it is, reinforces that impression: this movie is structured as a series of shoot-'em-up levels, in which our heroine uses her array of guns and blades and martial-arts moves to fight through cadres of generic dumb-mob NPCs - fascistic security guards; werewolves; more werwolves; and fascistic security guards who turn into werewolves: three of the four acts - or rather, levels - take place in the sort of moodily generic corridors-and-chambers settings you'd expect in a shooter, and they're paced by what are essentially cutscenes that push the plot along. The climactic action sequence eventually involves four protagonists fighting a mix of bosses and expendable NPCs, but perhaps the scriptwriters were playing Call of Duty the day they faxed that in.
It doesn't help that the unconvincing CGI on the werwolves would have been more in-keeping in a movie from the 1990s or a multiplayer gameplay sequence - and the cartoonish fate of exploding werwolves doesn't match the unflinchingly visceral way that some of the non-CGI characters are slaughtered earlier in the movie.
It doesn't help that the werwolf boss-character in his human form looks a lot like Chris Martin from Coldplay, either.
Awakening is also the first movie I've seen in 3D, and I have to admit that I wasn't impressed. Perhaps it's just my eyes or where I was sitting in the cinema, but fast-moving figures came over blurry, and the background often seemed distractingly prominent - and it was hard to see the point of any of it. True, 3D CGI can do attention-catching things with glass, smoke, air bubbles, bullets under water, but I suspect that I'd have enjoyed the movie more if I'd not had the distraction.
The emphasis on each individual visual sequence as a stylistic tableau might work in a computer game - the focus on specific 3D elements in each scene reminds me of the little bits of full animation in the cutscenes of ancient games like Myst and TIE FIghter - but a series of disparate and attention-seeking VFX tricks doesn't make for a coherent visual experience, and suggests that the film-makers either have a low opinion of the viewers' attention span, or a limited sense of storytelling coherence themselves.
To work as part of a joined-up visual narrative, 3D sequences would require a level of visual consistency and abstraction pushed far beyond the fetishized sci-fi baroque of this series - and that's saying a lot: it makes me think that the discipline involved is probably easier to obtain with anime or stylized CGI than live action.
In the final analysis, the 3D is disappointing and annoying, but not so much so that its failure takes over the film - it's simply something you have to work through in certain scenes; that's a conclusion that probably doesn't reflect terribly highly on the success of 3D technology, but it means the film survives it more-or-less intact.
So, overall, this is an okay film - the mediocre quality of certain aspects of the production doesn't sink it, and the central performances elevate it to the point at which it's actually worth watching. Given the strong box-office opening in the USA, a fifth instalment seems likely; let's hope they ditch the 3D cameras, revamp the CGI werewolves, and script some fight sequences that feel less like they were written for a generic XBox shooter.
After all, Kate Beckinsale kicking ass in a rubber catsuit, and acting rather well afterwards, is a winning combination.
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