Selene's heart is broken

UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING (2012)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Underworld: Awakening" is the template of an action-horror flick  - it does a bang-job of delivering action but doesn't quite flesh out its characters. It runs 88 minutes long but it actually cuts to the end credits at the 80 minute mark. Up to that point, we have black-leather-spandexed Kate Beckinsale as Selene, the sexy vampire who is searching for her daughter (Indian Isley), a half-vampire, half-lycan who is in danger of either being killed by the Lycans or the human race, who have just discovered that both vampires and Lycans live amongst them.

Unlike the humdrum first two "Underworld" sequels and the fitfully interesting prequel that followed, this fourth chapter is surprisingly enjoyable and good bloody fun for a while. Selene continues to pack heat and do those "Matrix" flips in slow-motion while fending off Lycans, rampaging werewolves to the rest of you. In fact, for the first thirty minutes of the movie, after Selene wakes up from a decade-long cryogenic state, she kills more people than probably the first two "Underworlds" combined. Beckinsale gets to emote a bit when she discovers that her lover, also a crossbreed like her daughter, has also been kept in a frozen solid state at some sort of high-security medical lab. "My heart is not cold. My heart is broken," says Selene. Other than that, it is same old Selene with Beckinsale looking more fetching than ever, and she even sports a trenchcoat for the first time (she steals it from a department store which is suspicuously shot the same way as the original "The Terminator" aping Michael Biehn).

There is some business about Lycans receiving inoculation treatments from their worst nightmare - silver bullets and silver grenades - but it is a fairly slim story and slimmer narrative thrust. The movie is action-heavy with the expected fight sequences between both creatures in a climax that beats anything I've seen in this series thus far. Charles Dance has a short and spectacular part as a vampire elder - he is on equal footing with Bill Nighy's elder vampire from previous entries. Beckinsale and Isley are at the heart of this film (Isley cuts herself again and again and watches her arm heal - a disturbing moment that easily brings up real-life teens who cut themselves to feel no pain) and give it an anchor that the screenplay doesn't provide. "Underworld: Awakening" is the best of the series and my little guilty pleasure, but it feels incomplete and undernourished. I wanted more, something I can't say about the other sequels.