Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans (2008)

Like the tagline suggests (Every war has a beginning) UNDERWORLD: RISE OF THE LYCANS is a prequel to UNDERWORLD and traces the origin of the original blood feud between the Vampires and the Lycans. With the help of his secret lover Sonia (Rhona Mitra), Lucian (Martin Sheen) stands against Viktor (Bill Nighy) to free his kind of their life of slavery.

Having been a fan of the first 2 movies I was interested to see what would happen with UNDERWORLD: RISE OF THE LYCANS without two key components from the first movies – Len Wiseman as director and of course Kate Beckinsale in the lead role. Wiseman was still involved with producer and writer credits but this time directing was left with Patrick Tatopoulos. He too had been involved in the first two movies, in which he had designed some of the creatures that we saw in the movies.

In all honest Tatopoulos doesn’t do much wrong with UNDERWORLD: RISE OF THE LYCANS but I fear it will be heavily criticised and labelled as the worst of the trilogy. Yes, It probably is the worst of the three but I say that not in a disrespectful way as I enjoyed it but I didn’t offer anything the first two hadn’t already.

One of the more noticeable problems it did suffer was the camera work during action scenes. At time it was difficult to make out what was happening which did detract ever so slightly from the death scenes. The biggest problem was simply the story. As it was a prequel we already knew what was going to happen – Infact we actually saw some of the very scenes in the first movie. RISE OF THE LYCANS then had to rely on how it got to these points in time an unfortunately I doesn’t do enough to deviate enough from the other movies therefore making it pointless.

All that being said I still managed to enjoy it. There were some good performances from Martin Sheen as Lucian and another from Bill Nighy as the evil Viktor which helped the movie along. If I strip it back to the bare bones it’s simply done for me exactly what it said ob the tin. It had Vampires, Lycans, Action, Gore and of course the not just as, but still sexy as hell Rhona Mitra. Yes typical guy answer, I know, but at the end of the day if you go see a movie like this you have to know what your gonna see. Of course we aren’t gonna be seeing an award winning movie, we are gonna treated to a non stop action movie and plenty of guts and gore.

For those of you who were big fans of the first two movies you may still enjoy this one but for anyone else I would probably only recommend it if you were a completist but even then if you do decide to skip it then you won’t miss anything as nothing new is offered.

Date: 25/01/2009
Rating: 3.5/5
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