Underworld: Critic Reviews

The sort of movie in which the head vampire telegraphs his evil by using a cell phone and dressing like the Kinks' Ray Davies in the early '80s.

Achieves only loudness, aggressive confusion and one of the silliest head-splittings in film history.

Features some of the year's most laughable dialogue.

For all its slick, neo-noir style, Underworld brings very little that's new to a hoary genre, except for the cliches and conventions of other hoary genres.

It needs a wooden stake and a silver bullet through its script.

Its sights are so transparently set on franchisehood that cynical is the only way to feel about it.

It takes a premise that should have made for primo goth froth ... and renders it (forgive me) bloodless, even when the corn syrup flows by the gallon.

The movie is stylish and cruel, and mightily entertaining for certain covens out there.

A vampire film for the new millennium -- bold, galvanizing and darkly stylish.

It's slick and technically well made, but also derivative and slow.

A well-conceived, powerful movie, over the top for all the right reasons.

This is a movie so paltry in its characters and shallow in its story that the war seems to exist primarily to provide graphic visuals.

Revels in more flash than fantasy. There's awful lot of story fat here between the form-fitting plastic jumpsuits.

A noisy, tiresome affair that can't manage one moment of wit or real tension.

Entertaining in fits and starts, but it's undercut by its nincompoop plot and an obsession -- unfortunately prevalent in horror movies these days -- with biomedical mumbo-jumbo.

Sometimes talent and good looks just aren't enough -- [Beckinsale] lacks the movie star presence needed to give life to a supernatural hero in a B-genre film.

Somewhere out there, Dracula is turning over in his grave.

Wiseman ... seems vastly more concerned with making a fashion statement than scaring the bejesus out of us.

It's hard to recall a more sexless vampire flick.

By any reasonable standard, this dark vampire epic -- all massive overacting, cologne-commercial design and sexy cat suits -- sucks.

125 minutes is a long time to stare at a movie that's basically in bleached blue-and-white with occasional splotches of brick red.

Underworld captured my attention sporadically, but not consistently.

Keeps getting held back by an uncertain pace and a too-tight- lipped tone that elicits a few inadvertent snickers.

'Your incompetence is most taxing,' says the chief vampire (Bill Nighy). A line that pretty much nails this rusty Blade.

Alas, as is often the case with lower-end genre movies, the story cooked up by Wiseman and his friends, actor Kevin Grevioux and the film's screenwriter, Danny McBride, is decidedly less important than the look of the film and its influences.