…you’ll love this one. Has everything the first did, but better: much more blood, more fights, more gunfire and more Beckensale in tight leather. Nice effects and the story isn’t bad. it even has Derek Jacobi as the requisite Distinguished Actor In An Action Film role. Yay Brother Cadfael!
I actually kinda liked this one. The first one was shit, in my opinion. They managed to take a premise that no one should have been able to screw up (werewolves vs. vampires) and made it nothing more than a goth-fest Matrix ripoff complete with super cool camera slowdowns to emphasize just how great the fight you’re currently watching is.
That said, this movie is definitely the Terminator 2 of the series, in that you don’t even need to watch the first one (thank God) to entirely get what’s going on. We get 3 minutes of flashback at the beginning explaining everything up until that point.
Overall the story was better. A bit of dialogue was cliché, and I didn’t appreciate the writers assuming the audience was stupid and therefore feeling the need to reiterate certain points that were made only an hour earlier, but overall I give this one a pass.
Haven’t seen the sequel, but they ran the original on TV a few weeks back in a misguided attempt to drum up business for the new movie. Not quite sure how you can manage to make vampires vs werewolves boring, but they did the job. As far as I could tell, the vampires did nothing much vampire-like except hang around castles, dress in black and act all angsty-like. Vampires with guns just doesn’t work, especially when the guns (even the handguns) are apparently full auto with an infinite number of rounds. Which they had to have because our heroine Selene, despite being a trained assassin, couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. Then again, neither could anyone else.
(She could hit the floor, as was demonstrated in a cinematically cool, but completely-retarded-from-the-standpoint-of-real-life scene in which she shoots her way out of a tight corner by etching a hole through several floors with her handguns.)
Note that I can’t speak for the whole movie as I fell asleep halfway through.
A question: the first movie had Kate and Scott basically costarring. Now the posters still list Scott as a starring role but he is no where to be seen in any of the trailers. How big of a role did he end up having in the second movie?
I thought he was on screen more than the first movie. I only glimpsed him once in the trailers too. I guess he’s not as important as Kate and her rubber suit.
You do get to see them both nekkid this time - sort of.
While not great, the 1st movie was actually deeper than the typical action flick.
I kinda liked it - and Kate in tight leather doesn’t hurt. In general, girls + tight leather + guns = cool.
SPOILERS - I’m not going to box them
The guy who was set up in the beginning to be a bad guy had an arguably noble purpose, and the main character’s mentor / hero turned out be be a bad guy.
Brian
I agree, the first one was shit, and if a friend of mine hadn’t asked me to go with her to see Evolution, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with the sequel. I ended up really liking it, it’s not great cinema, but the plot is easier to follow than in the original, and the characters have more complex motives. A lot of crap from the first movie was cleared up too, such as why Selene survived her family’s massacre, and what was up with the Corvinus brothers. Markus’ quest for William was heartbreaking, if totally misguided, and you couldn’t help wishing that somehow they’d get a happy ending.
Scott Speedman, who plays Michael, is once again something of an afterthought here. He gets in a little buttkicking, kisses and beds Selene, and otherwise is superfluous. But he was like that in the first movie, so nothing out-of-character there. The sex scene was surprisingly graphic! My friend confessed she would’ve been uncomfortable watching it with a male companion.
But what did you think of him as an actor? He was fighting and in makeup so much, I couldn’t get a sense of him as an actor. He wasn’t obviously bad, just I couldn’t get a feeling for him.
I didn’t like it. At all.
Unboxed Spoilers
During the opening scene seemed to speed everything up (much the same way they do in old movies like the original robin hood) and it looked pretty bad, in my opinion anyhow.
Michael didn’t make much progress throughout the movie other than the fact that he can come back to life after some random amount of time. That brings me to another point. I don’t need voiceover narrative just to clear up why he is coming back to life. I’ve pretty much figured out that he’s special. Christ, let us figure it out.
I dunno, too many ‘what the hell’ moments for me, I guess. The worst part was how they got us to agree to watching a third movie in the trilogy. What they say is basically, “I know everything appears to be okay right now but the producers promise that it isn’t and we want you to expect a third movie. We just can’t be bothered to think of anything just yet…stay tuned.” I was actually angry after that. That probably soured my opinion of the rest of the movie.
I missed something in the opening scene, I think. Marcus convinces Viktor et al that if he dies the rest of the line of vampires die as well, including Viktor. So why are they all pointing guns at him. They have just as much to lose. I might have missed something there…I don’t know.
My interpretation is that Markus lied to Viktor. Obviously, at the end they kill him and William, and nothing happens to either the vampire or werewolf characters. Markus probably told Viktor that so that Viktor would think twice about killing either of them. As for blasting away at them, I guess they were taking the chance that Markus was lying, since if they didn’t kill him and William the world was doomed anyway.
It’s established in the scene with the head honcho (beard, lives on a big ship) that they were lying because he’s the original guy not marcus or william (not to mention that he flat out says his son was lying), so by the end of the movie we know nothing will happen.
I just thought Marcus had them (Viktor, crew) convinced at the beginning but all of a sudden they started pointing guns at Markus and I got confused.
They took the chance. If they don’t kill Markus, he unleashes William and the world is overrun by lycanthropic monsters. If they do kill him, they run the risk that they’re dooming themselves. Scenario 1, everyone dies for sure. Scenario 2, they just maybe die.
Was it just me, or were the Corvinus brothers a little… off? Markus is all raving “We will be together!” and ripping off heads left and right to free his big hairy brother. Just sayin’.
So, is there going to be a third movie?
I mean, all three elder vampires are dead, and the weres have no mentioned heroes left. Contrasted with Selene and Micheal, both of whom are apparently actually immortal now, how can they drum up dramatic tension?
Hmm. With no clean-up crews, we could now have vampires and werewolves vs. people. That could be fun.
I think the third movie should be Underworld: Creationism. They have to fight Jesus, preferably played by Phil Caracas. 
That could be cool too, with some black ops government agency going after them, with some Nemesis-esque supersoldier science experiment as the “Big Bad” of the movie.
Actually, I’ve got it now! Selene and Micheal board a plane bound for Hawaii to enjoy their honeymoon or something, and discover that there is… a BASILISK on the plane! 
What they should have done, is have Derek Jacobi as what he seemd to be, just the head of the cleanup crew, and introduce Corvinus in the third as a guy who intentionally made his kids into monsters, just to see what would happen or to give him something to do while being immortal.
And I assumed that Marcus was telling the truth and that’s why Selene was ok in the sunlight.
The first thing my husband and I talked about when we got out of the theater was how Michael didn’t appear to be anatomically correct. With the camera angle they were using, we should have been seeing some parts. We had a good laugh about it.
How was Viktor’s role? The only reason I really liked the first movie was because of him.
Okay, that and the fact that when he and Michael were fighting in the first movie, I wanted to stand up and scream, ‘Beat his ass, Kain! Pwn that Raziel!’.
He was only in the flashback in the beginning.
Viktor is dead, remember? Selene killed him, and rightfully so.
I thought the first one was pretty good, but this one was a bit of a stinker. Other than Michael and Alexander, all the men look too much alike, so it gets confusing trying to keep track of who is whom. The dramatic music when
Michael was “dead”
just made you know he really wasn’t. And how did
Marcus become a hybrid?
I was pretty disapointed.