Underworld: Blood Wars (2017)

'Underworld: Blood Wars' sees Kate Beckinsale's vampire Death Dealer Selene betrayed by her own kind and she's finally had enough of the ever continuing war between vampire and lycans and goes medieval on them all. The film is the fifth entry in the 'Underworld' franchise that began back in 2004, around the same time that director Paul W.S. Anderson's 'Resident Evil' films began to take off. The reason I bring this up is because the two series feel very similar, in both it's behind the scenes aspects of the director's wives being the star vehicle, and in that they're both rather dull, loud, and bloodless action films that add nothing to the far too crowded genre.

To be fair, I have only seen the first two films before settling in for 'Blood Wars', but even If I went though every Wikipedia article detailing every story detail of this universe, I think that I and many of the other uninitiated audience members would still be left feeling cold, frustrated, and confused. The main problem seems to stem from it's sloppy editing, in which we'll watch a two to three minute sequence involving usually two characters then, without warning we'll jump cut to another short scene. It's as if the film was pieced together from smaller vingettes into a 90 minute film and it seems as if the director and studio was more concerned with rushing through the story and character development as much as possible in order to show off another bland and generic action sequence, most of which are shot to stand out using the now common 3D gimmick.

'Underworld: Blood Wars' is harmless and fans of this long running series will probably enjoy it to some degree more than I did, but I speak as a critic and not as a fan that this film is very poorly put together. It's choppy editing, mindless action, and overdone plot points just weakens it severely. Despite what I think about the franchise as a whole, I will say that the previous films were nowhere near this rushed. They at least attempted to make a decent action film that you could spend a day wasting, but now the series has simply bled out.