Lycan We Be Friends
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is the movie Underworld 2 should have been. That’s not to say that it isn’t a very flawed experience (it is), but it’s not the train-wreck-with-no-survivors that the other film was. For what it was, a b-movie fantasy flick, I enjoyed it.
Almost Kate Beckinsale
I liked Underworld quite a bit which is odd because I didn’t care for the main story. It was everything around the story that I liked: the history, the backstory, the supporting characters. Underworld 3 is, in theory, exactly what I was looking for. It tells the history that was mentioned only briefly in the first film, namely the beginning of the Lycan - Vampire war.
The cast brings back a couple of the players from Underworld: Bill Nighy as vampire elder, Viktor, and Michael Sheen as Lycan leader, Lucian. Rhona Mitra, the girl-who-could-almost-be-Kate-Beckensale-but-isn’t, plays Sonja, Viktor’s daughter and Selene stand-in.
Sheen and Nighy are mostly good but Sheen, lacking the pathos of the first film, has a hard time making Lucian compelling and Nighy lapses into some serious hamminess, the kind of hamminess that makes serious scenes funny. Mitra is fine looking but, even less than Beckensale, she can’t look or act convincingly tough, not like the warrior queen the character is supposed to be, not a proud, powerful amazon.
I won’t go into the plot but it’s got enough holes to dig out the Grand Canyon. They’re not so glaring taken each by each to destroy the film but they’re far from invisible.
Going into the theater, I was mumbling a mantra to myself: please don’t stink, please don’t stink, please don’t stink. Well, it didn’t stink. And for that I am eternally grateful. Is it as good as the original film? Hard to say. Maybe, I guess. More likely, they’re about the same. On a cold day in January, that was good enough for me.
