Underworld: Awakening

Here we go.  As tween/desperate adult audiences everywhere prepare for the final episode of the Twilight Saga, somebody somewhere decided to remind horror/action fans that there were movies getting vampires wrong as far back as 2003.  Underworld: Awakening is the fourth entry in the Underworld series and is the sequel to the second film (2006's Underworld: Evolution), because making a sequel to the third movie would have been silly.  I'm not going to argue that there is absolutely no reason to make this movie --- I find the "Kate Beckinsale in tight, shiny leather" argument particularly compelling --- but did we really need another movie where vampires shoot guns at werewolves?

Okay, that trailer actually looks halfway decent.  The basic premise of the series (vampires vs. lichens lycans) has been upended, and now both classes are being hunted by the deadliest game of all: man.  There's some promise there.  What I hated about the original Underworld was how completely de-powered  the vampires felt next to the werewolves; making the enemy human changes that power dynamic.  Maybe vampires are more powerful, but there are just so many humans, using so much technology, that the Underworldians will have to change their MO.  That sounds worth checking out, right?

Underworld: Awakening begins with Selene (Kate Beckinsale), the vampire shoot-'em-up expert, and Michael (Scott Speedman), her vampire/werewolf (Vampwolf?  Werepire?) boyfriend, on the run, after the events of Underworld: Evolution.  Boom boom boom, bang bang bang, and Selene (and presumably Michael) has been captured by the human military.  The next thing you know, Selene has been cryogenically frozen and the rest of the movie is the camera slowly zooming in on her ice-block-face.

And by "rest of the movie," I of course mean "title sequence," because Selene breaks free of her icy cage and runs for her life.  She quickly learns that she has been frozen in some sort of science lab for twelve years and that the world is very different following the same trend it was when she was captured.  The humans have concentrated their efforts and have wiped werewolves off the face of the planet, and are pretty close to doing the same to vampires. 

Tip for wiping out vampires: start with the ones who have their own movies

But what set Selene free?  And what happened to Michael?  Well, her escape wasn't entirely her own doing; someone dubbed Subject 2 by the lab scientists also broke out that night.  Who or what is Subject 2?  Why do the scientists want it so badly?  The plot tries to focus on these points until enough time has passed for the film to return to its roots.  Remember the whole "Lycans are exinct" thing?  It turns out that was greatly exaggerated.

The acting in Underworld: Awakening isn't exactly great, but it's certainly good enough for a movie about vampires with guns.  Kate Beckinsale is once again very stoic in the lead, although the script makes her seem a lot stupider this time around.  Let's be honest --- the hardest part of playing Selene is looking good in her outfits, and Beckinsale still pulls it off.  Thankfully, that isn't something that is crassly exploited by the filmmakers to draw attention away from the story.

I prefer the phrase "remorselessly objectified"

Stephen Rea played the doctor heading the research on frozen vampires.  Rea's a fine actor, but he is a one-note villain here.  Michael Ealy was decent as the rogue cop who somehow comes to the conclusion that being lied to by his superiors means that he should help vampires.  I'm not saying that he's wrong, but it is a little weird at how little it takes to convince him.  Charles Dance picks up the thematic baton as the elder vampire who just can't agree with Selene on anything.  I'm not saying that his character is irrational, but every single Underworld has had a stuffy old vampire who causes unnecessary conflicts, and I'm bored with it.  Theo James played the flip side of that coin as the young vamp that supports Selene.  Kris Holden-Ried was the primary werewolf threat and was supposed to be rather intimidating, but I just couldn't get over how much he reminded me of Chris Martin from Coldplay. 

"IT WAS ALL YELLOW!"

That, of course, led me to making several Coldplay lyric references whenever he was onscreen, which accidentally turned out to be one of the highlights of the film for me.  Rounding out the cast is India Eisley, who got to be a girl of mystery.  She was okay, I guess, but her part required her to snivel and cower a lot, which got a little annoying.  None of the actors were particularly impressive or distractingly bad, which is almost an accomplishment when you are the third sequel in a series.

This movie was directed by Swedish filmmakers Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein.  It's okay if you haven't heard of them, because this is only their second English-language film, and the other was a box office dud.  The most notable choice Mårlind and Stein made was to play Underworld: Awakening completely straight.  This series has always taken itself very seriously, but there were usually a few moments where the characters reveled in their abilities or each other.  That doesn't happen here.  The story (ridiculous as it is) is told plainly, the backstory from the other movies is explained crisply, and there are action scenes every few minutes. 

"Hi, we're cannon fodder for Scene 43"

The action (for the most part) looks pretty good.  Sure, the Lycan transformations are hit and miss, but that has been an ongoing problem for this series; why fix it for the fourth movie?  More importantly, Beckinsale still looks good doing wire stunts.  There just aren't any great moments.  So it's a serviceable action movie with a science fiction/horror vibe, right?  Actually, no.  It's a mediocre action movie with a sexy leather-clad lady and pretty terrible sci-fi script.  The screenplay credit is split between four people (including J. Michael Straczynski and Underworld co-creator Len Wiseman), so it's pretty clear that the story had a few overhauls.  And it shows.  Do you like plot twists?  Do you like them better if the "twist" isn't surprising in the least?  Well, that's what you get with Underworld: Awakening.  Mårlind and Stein did an okay job with what was given to them --- I seriously doubt that the relatively unknown Swedish duo was given much leeway with their first big budget movie --- but what they had was a sorry excuse to make a quick buck off of a franchise that had already had one too many sequels.

Above: every Underworld action scene, ever

The biggest problem I had with Underworld: Awakening was how dull it was. This should have been an interesting take on Underworld's already unique angle on vampires.  But it isn't.  The humans never stand a chance against Selene and her friends and it is incomprehensible that they were ever a threat.  But then the not-at-all surprising reveal of werewolves as the primary antagonists happens, and we're right back at the beginning of the series.  The only difference is that this time, we have a little girl character to be helpless instead of Scott Speedman.

Adding a kid to the mix is always a sign of desperation

The only thing that kept me interested in the film was pointing out conceptual flaws in it.  For instance, if vampires have been hunted to the brink of extinction by man, then it can be concluded that technology and superior numbers are what gave man the edge.  And yet, the difficulties vampires have with humans seems to only be dictated by the script.  When Selene needs to be captured, she gets blown up; when she needs to escape, she kills four heavily armed men that have her in their gun sights with ease.  And if vampires are that fast, why don't we see that more often?  The only new element that this sequel added was a non-powered human doing some of the killing, and even his scenes were hilariously unlikely.  My personal favorite was when Michael Ealy was firing at a car and managed to kill the driver and shoot out the a front tire with only three bullets.

Even he doesn't believe he's that good of a shot

Underworld: Awakening probably wasn't designed to bring in a new audience.  If you thought that a series about vampires and werewolves trying to kill each other with guns was incredibly stupid before (and it is), this movie isn't going to change your mind.  I've always enjoyed laughing at these movies, but this was just plain boring.  While the action was plentiful, it was nothing new.  While the story was stupid, it wasn't stupid-funny.  I was hoping for a mindless action movie, but what I got was just mindless.  In short, this movie sucks.  And not in the "sexy leather-clad vampire" sort of way.

Takers

Matt Dillon is apparently trying to become the king of the crappy heist movie.  Not even a calendar year after he starred in the armored car heist flick, Armored, he co-stars in Takers, which focuses on --- you guessed it --- an armored car heist.  Congrats, Dillon, in finding the least entertaining robbery scripts in Hollywood.

A group of friends --- Gordon (Idris Elba), John (Paul Walker), A.J. (Hayden Christensen), and brothers Jake (Michael Ealy) and Jesse (Chris Brown) --- work together once a year to pull off a daring bank robbery to finance their ridiculously high-rolling lifestyles.  Seriously, these guys have some really, really nice stuff.  After their most recent job, which was pulled off flawlessly and without firing a shot, the group is ready to lay low for a while before they get together and start planning their next heist.  That's when Ghost (Tip "T.I." Harris) shows up and makes everybody feel awkward; Ghost just got out of prison after serving time for getting caught during one of the crew's old robberies.  He never told the police anything about the others and they, in turn, kept his four million dollars safely invested.  One day out of prison, though, and Ghost has a high-risk, high-reward robbery lined up --- he has the delivery route for a pair of armored cars that are carrying upwards of twenty-five million dollars.  To put that in perspective, in the robbery that opens the film, they got away with about two million.  The plan is very risky, and the fact that Ghost has the plan so soon is suspicious, but the real issue is that this is a one-time offer, because the armored cars are doing that route in only five days.  What do they do?  Well, in the words of Gordon, "We're takers, gents. That's what we do for a living. We take."  That doesn't sound trite at all.

They have the whole "walk slowly away from the explosion" bit down pat.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the supposedly perfect robbery from the beginning of the movie was not entirely perfect.  The stereotypically obsessed with his job (and, therefore, not his daughter) Detective Welles (Matt Dillon) takes the robbery personally, for some reason.  Maybe it's because he likes a challenge, or maybe the easily identifiable salute given by Jesse (while masked) to the security camera rubbed him the wrong way.  Whatever the reason, Welles winds up following a string of highly coincidental and circumstantial evidence that leads him to the crew, as they plan the armored truck job.  Will he be able to out-think the thinkers on this one?

That's an interesting angle to take with any sort of robbery story.  Generally speaking, the stories are told from the perspective of the thief, so the audience naturally sympathizes with them and wants the bad guys to succeed, even though they are stealing.  Takers spends substantial amounts of time with Detective Welles and his partner as they try to crack the case.  Why?  My best guess would be a poor screenplay, but that's just a guess.

The acting in Takers is --- not surprisingly, given the cast --- not that great.  Idris Elba got to use his genuine London accent and he was given the most emotional depth in the film, but it's not enough to make his character seem smart or likable.  Paul Walker is actually the most likable character in the movie, if only because his character is pretty straightforward; Walker's acting skills are minimal, but he came off looking pretty solid here.  Michael Ealy 's character is given a few opportunities to differentiate himself from the others --- he is in love with Zoe Saldana's character --- but he doesn't do much with his chances.  Hayden Christensen didn't have to emote, so he was surprisingly not terrible here.  He did get to make some truly unfortunate faces during an action sequence, though.

Chris Brown and Tip "T.I." Harris did about as well as you might expect from professional musicians; their dialogue often sounded wooden and awkward, and they posed when not delivering their lines.  Brown provided a surprisingly entertaining parkour chase sequence, though, which certainly dwarfed his acting shortcomings.  Matt Dillon's character was pretty one-dimensional, even though we get a glimpse into his family life; he tries to be interesting, but his acting chops are not strong enough to overcome thin writing.  Jay Hernandez was similarly shallow as Dillon's partner that is obviously crooked; we find out his kid needs dialysis treatments and he has a fantastic houseon a cop's salary.  There are a handful of other recognizable actors in small roles --- Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Steve Harris, and the always slimy Johnathon Schaech --- but they are just there as minor role players, nothing spectacular about any of them.

Acting lesson 1: Paul, show me your "thinking" face.

Heist movies are not about the characters involved, usually.  The best movies in this genre are fun to watch because you get to see meticulously plan and then pull off some ridiculously convoluted and complicated robbery.  You don't want the robbers to get away because they are stealing to support their family or because they are going to fund a charity or anything else --- you root for the robbers because they are doing some cool stuff.  By splitting the focus of the story between the robbers and the police pursuing them, Takers complicates what should have been the easiest part of the story.  I'm not saying that you can't tell both sides of a cops-and-robbers tale, but you shouldn't unless you plan on actually developing your characters.  This movie has eight important characters, with recognizable actors filling in bit part roles; it's hard to tell who we're supposed to care about.  What do we learn about the three main characters?  Gordon has a sister, Detective Welles is an unintentionally crappy dad, Ghost is a petty jerk, and John...um... well, the most personal thing we learn about his character is that he enjoys poolside threesomes.  That's not enough information to actually care about any of those three, but it's tons more development than the rest of the cast gets.

The heist itself --- the armored car one --- is fairly interesting, but it's nowhere near as cool as it should be, either.  The planning stages are whirled through, with absolutely no level of difficulty.  When I finally saw what was being done, I was underwhelmed.  I was also confused.  If Ghost is potentially untrustworthy, why is he given the job with the least amount of risk and the highest probability of escape?  Whatever.  Despite the shaky hand-held camera to indicate that action was taking place, I was pretty bored by the time the heist attempt happened.  Luckily, that scene was followed by Chris Brown's extended (and mostly unnecessary) parkour sequence, which was the highlight of the film.

Takers spent a lot of time in development hell before finally coming out in the summer of 2010.  Director John Luessenhop took almost four years off the project to care for his ailing son, T.I. spent eight months in prison, and Chris Brown made the public relations mistake of beating the shit out of his girlfriend.  The movie was finally released, though, that we can all agree on.  It's just not very good.  Luessenhop doesn't develop the characters on-screen and every action sequence looks like it was filmed by someone having a seizure.  I will give credit that it appears that the actors did most of their own stunts, but they might have been more impressive if the camera had a tripod.  This isn't that bad of a movie, but it commits the greatest crime a robbery movie can make --- it's boring.