CREDIT: SCREEN GEMS
Underworld: Blood Wars whiplashes you into a world of tedious action and empty drama.

Underworld: Blood Wars is the fifth installment of the action-horror Underworld series. Taking place in a gothic world of vampires versus werewolves (called lycans), Blood Wars follows vampire Selene as she is pursued by both the waning vampires in search of revenge for the killing of their elders and by the lycans in search of her vampire-lycan hybrid daughter in order to generate a powerful army of hybrids.

The first thing we see in Blood Wars is a rapid-fire recap montage that crams in more information than a person can possibly absorb, followed by an abrupt opening scene in the middle of some action involving characters who you’re not sure if you understand who they are, doing things that you do don’t fully understand why.

This is how the movie feels for at least the first half hour. A major flaw of this film is its complete dependence on the context of previous films. The recap is a lazy choice that doesn’t do new initiates any good; easing the audience in with a slow trickle of information would take exactly the same amount of time for new viewers to get a grip of what’s going on.

The pacing of this film is supersonic. It felt like the producers knew I was dying to get it over with already, with shot after shot of constant action and plot points. The over the top action scenes never let up and all the main characters seem to be invincible, making it impossible to care about what’s happening. There is practically never a time in this film where the characters have a moment to breathe. There is a feeling that Blood Wars could possibly have benefited from being split into multiple slower paced films, which is confounding considering there are four other installments in this series.

Throughout the film, characters have flashbacks, which look good but are too fast to be as helpful as they probably should be.

There are also a handful of cheesy slow motion moments. A lot of things that occur in this movie seem to occur simply because they look cool, not because they actually make any sense.

Underworld: Blood Wars is stylized in a specific way. It is a modern take on a gothic aesthetic incorporating modern Matrix-esque technology. This aesthetic is pushed to its limits, taking on a form so extreme it’s impossible to take seriously.

Everything in this movie is black, grey or a deep shade of blue. It doesn’t take long for you to start begging some deity or cinema employee to turn the goddamn brightness up. All indoor lighting is via gothic street lamp style lights. Characters sit at long throne made of black fencing. In other words there’s a lot of stuff I’m pretty sure I’ve seen at Home Depot.

The dialogue is full of formal language, with characters saying “shall” instead of “will”, “we must go” instead of “let’s go/we have to go/let’s get out of here”, someone calling someone they’re sleeping with a “bedfellow”. Give me a break. It’s unnecessary and reeks of pretentiousness.

The special effects in this film are hit or miss. I remember when Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban came out, there is a scene where Remus Lupin turns into a werewolf. As a kid, I found this so epic that I watched the whole movie multiple times just for that moment. In Blood Wars, this moment happens right off the bat when you have no idea what’s going on and then it keeps happening over and over again until the novelty has completely worn off.

The transformations look awesome, but when the werewolves start walking around they have this CGI-looking, awkward, unnatural, physics-defying way of moving about that just looks silly. Besides this, there are definitely some cool and realistic special effects throughout the film.

The score for Blood Wars is about as generic as you can get, but it does the job effectively. It isn’t distracting; it enhances the tone and gives key moments more weight. The sound for this movie is great, with creative sound effect choices that enhance scenes and help make the movie more dynamic.

The cast of Blood Wars is passable though plagued by a lot of generic-feeling performances. The only standout performances that come off as original, believable and memorable are Kate Beckinsale as protagonist Selene, Theo James as the vampire David and Charles Dance as Thomas, David’s father.