Ever gone to the county fair and ate a whole bunch of stuff that's not so good for you? Of course you have! One of those things was cotton candy, wasn't it? You know cotton candy....that whipped up sugar confection that looks so big before you eat it, but then you bite off a piece, and it immediately shrinks down to a tasty, but sort of gravely residue in your mouth. This is akin to the experience of watching Underworld: Evolution!
It starts out as its predecessor, Underworld begins...a tasty whipped up confection that nearly explodes your eyeballs with its incredible CGI and of course the most lovely Kate Beckinsale wearing her latex outfit like it was so much painted on her. But where the first film is a pretty lean and mean action flick/monster machine, Evolution feels torpid and top heavy, treating its light weight material as something of much more epic import than it deserved...as if Peter Jackson was doing the S&M version of The Lord of the Rings. Even the somewhat interesting race/class struggle of the lowly, blue collar lycans (werewolves) against the aristocratic, velvet collar vampires that enlivened the first film becomes a sort of vague afterthought here.
It does expand on the lycan-vampire struggle that was kind of thrown into the first film to explain why all these good looking and muscular folks in spandax, leather, and latex (Oh my!) were going after each other tooth and nail. This has been going on for generations upon generations since the first lycan and vampire (brothers
of course!) decided to take a dislike to each other. Throw in Derek Jacobi as their immortal but brooding papa and you have something that threatens to back up on you, once you take a bite out of it. And really....Sir Derek must have poor relatives he's putting through night-school somewhere, because why would he need to be in this movie when just about any older male actor with a posh English accent could fill the bill with this kind of stuff.And yet...Kate B. sails through this film like a leather jacketed dove through a hailstorm of blood and bullets, only touching lightly down to spout the predictable one liner as she mows down lycan and vampire alike. With all the massive explosions, gore, and weapons of unearthly qualities....enough to shame The Matrix, Evolution is like most guilty pleasures...at times fun and actually entertaining. I just wouldn't want to turn in my Film Appreciation Club card by admitting that I found parts of this cotton candy confection mildly interesting....and then there is that gravely residue left in your mouth!
TH Reviews rating: 2.5 mildly interesting stars out of 5!!!
