This movie seems like it could have become one of my favorite movies if only a few things had been different. If I were in charge I would have built upon the strengths of the movie and dumped some of the dumb elements like a bad habit, man. All right, here are some thoughts.
The idea of werewolves fighting vampires is totally awesome. That said, the movie shouldn't have pretended to be as even-handed as it did. Its tagline was "which side will you choose?" or something similar, as if the movie wasn't being shown from the perspective of the vampires. It takes until the end of the movie to get any sort of emotional side to the werewolves, when Lucian tells us his story. If we would have seen a bit more of the werewolves, I would gladly have given up many of the more useless scenes in the vampire mansion.
Quick question: why'd they bother with the whole half-Vampire half-Lycan deal at all? They could have made an excellent movie with just normal werewolves and vampires. But I guess there's no real point to griping about that now.
Underworld's main mistake is assuming that we will "get it" when a lot of things happen. These things usually took me quite a few watchings to understand, like that the brand on Lucian's arm was Viktor's sign to show us that Lucian was his slave. If Selene had only said, "Hm, it's Viktor's mark," we could have noticed it more easily. Maybe I'm just used to having my movies handed to me and not having to think about them, but seriously, that dang brand was never addressed again.
Another thing that I didn't "get" was the exact nature of Kraven and Lucian's deal. What was Kraven's angle in all this? How the crap was such a brutal coup going to get him anything but the hatred of the remaining Vampires? And why the crap did he think that Selene would become his queen?
Quick note about Kraven: his actor sucks. Miserably. If he would have been the only thing wrong with the movie, it would still have been bad just because he's such a terrible actor. I swear he doesn't deliver a single freaking line right.
And for a Romeo and Juliet tale about a Vampire and Lycan falling in love, we get to see very little actually love story going on. We get the odd kiss or whatever, but there's never anything truly between them. "He saved my life." "She wears a lot of leather and is really mysterious." Wow, that's true love right there.
As I was watching this movie most recently I noticed that all the interesting characters in the show die. Lucian, Viktor, and even Kahn were the characters we really liked, and they all die. Even Raze was kinda cool, and he gets wasted too. Another thing that really got me was who killed whom. Kraven, who everybody hates, kills Lucian, who is a pretty cool character. Then Lucian's revenge is stabbing Kraven in the leg. Huh? He shoulda taken the guy's head off, then died. Or at least given the whole leg the chop.
One part that always gets me is the final fight between the Vampires and the Lycans. At least, we know that's what they are. For all the gunfire going on they might as well have been street gangs. Then we get to keep seeing Lycans charging the Vampires in wolf form only to get capped down. Well, duh, fellas! If you insist of going for a straight run at a guy with a friggin gun, don't be surprised when he shoots you down long before you're in claw range. Whatever happened to the trusty tactic of hiding in the shadows and jumping out to tear them apart before they can shoot?
Pet peeve: werewolf wall running. Why run on walls at all fellas, when there's a perfectly good floor? Yeah. I thought so. And no, no matter what the special features say, the effect wasn't cool. It looked like exactly what it was: guys in werewolf suits being pulled along the wall be wires and pretending to scrabble on the wall to make it look like they're somehow both moving forward and hanging on.
This movie does have a lot going for it. The look of the movie leaves me nothing to complain about. I liked how the Vampires dressed in sleek black leather coats while the Lycans had battered brown leather coats on. The city was cool looking. The mansion was quite noticeably Vampire-ish. The Lycans could have gotten a better place to hang out than a back alley somewhere, but at least the back alley looked cool.
Dang, more things to complain about: Lucian says in the beginning that the werewolves are trying to defeat the Vampires on their own ground. Okay... but what's the Lycans' traditional ground? The wilderness perhaps (despite what the back of the box says, but the back of the box is crap.) Well why don't we get to hear more about the wilderness then? Maybe see a werewolf running along, looking at home in his natural climate. That would have established the werewolves as wilderness-dwellers while at the same time making us like them more by showing them having this cool place in nature that we can envy.
I know that the Vampire elders "leapfrogging through time" is a plot point and sets up the events, but I still don't like it. What kind of self-respecting Vampire would leave the scene just to wake up a few hundred years later and pick up the reigns again? Sad.
We should have seen Michael turn into a normal werewolf once so we could see how good he was then. Then when he turns into the half-Lycan half-Vampire creature we could understand exactly how much better he is. And uh... is he teleporting? What's up with that?
The guys making this movie built some pretty cool werewolf suits. They even made werewolf legs that the stunt men could run in. Then why the heck don't we get to see more werewolves? Come on fellas. Do us a favor.
Right, that's all I can come up with now. That's a lot of complaining, yes, but if I didn't talk about it, it's a good thing. Probably. It's just a lot easier and probably more worthwhile to point out the bad parts of movies. Still, I've obviously seen this movie quite a few times, so it can't be that bad.
Parting thought: when Lucian stabs Kraven he should have said something witty like "Now you're bleeding." Or something similar. Just about him having to bleed now. Because that was a sort of theme. Uh... that is all.