Screen Gems other husband and wife franchise returned to our screens this weekend in full on 3D and re-vamped (i'm sorry, really I'm sorry) to take the series in a new direction under the guidance of Mårlind and Stein, the Swedish directors of STORM (2005) and SHELTER (2009).
Kate Beckinsale returns to her goth fetish role after an absence from the third series entry as the Death Dealer Selene which finds her waking up 12 years after her capture to a world fully awakened to the existence of vampires and werewolves where ethnic cleansing known as The Purge has rid humanity of all but a few pockets supernatural beings. Smashinh her way out of incarceration Selene finds she has a daughter, a hybrid being similar to her father Michael Corvin and spends most of the film trying to exert an emotional link to the child. It doesn't work.
UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING shows promise for about four or five minites and then the whole thing collapses with the appearance of a terrible Scott Speedman doppelgänger and from there in it a myriad mix of crash, smash broken CGI windows, wirework martial arts that is not only cribbed from THE MATRIX but also the RESIDENT EVIL series and monsters borrowed from the last appalling MUMMY movie. There's also a ten minute game of "Is that Chris Martin?" and pointless bored performances from Charles Dance, Stephen Rea and the bloke that was the tour rep in THE INBETWEENERS MOVIE.
It will take some going for a film to be as bad as UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING this year but it is still January and there are plenty of disinterested franchises queuing up to take out money. I wonder if any of ten will make me feel genuinely embareased for paying for them like this one has.
1/5
