DVD Of The Week: Underworld - Rise Of The Lycans (2009)

I'm all for verisimilitude in fantasy movies, but whoever thought it would be clever to shoot a film about a war between dark-clad vampires and dark-furred werewolves almost entirely at night clearly didn't give much thought to how difficult it would make the finished product to watch.

Although the story of Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans only runs for a mere 80-minutes, with 99 per cent of the action taking place in gloomy shadow or various degrees of darkness, this unsubtle reworking of Romeo And Juliet can seem almost a chore to sit through at times.

Which is a pity because this type of B-movie monster flick needs all the good will it can foster and that's a pretty large tick in the negative column before we even begin to think about the plot and performances.

I like dark movies as much as the next guy, but I mean in tone rather than visual appearance - a black and white, film noir reimagining of The Dark Knight would be easier to follow than Rise Of The Lycans.

In this prequel to the previous two Underworld movies, Rhona Mitra steps in as the leather-clad lead, Sonja, as the plot revolves around her illict affair with Lucian (Michael Sheen), the young werewolf slave of her father, Viktor (Bill Nighy).

It's only when, towards the end, you begin appreciate that Sonja's relationship with Viktor foreshadows his connection with Kate Beckinsale's Selene (who has a brief cameo in Rise Of The Lycans) that you can really see the justification for this film.

There are several solid fight sequences - the vampires' castle being overrun by werewolves is a stand-out moment, although it's no "siege of Minas Tirith" or "storming of Gondor" - with plenty wire work and dramatic slow-mo to heighten the superpowers of the combatants.

I also found Michael Sheen's uncanny similarity to Simon Pegg - both in appearance and voice - slightly off-putting and had to wonder if director Patrick Tatopoulos had actually somehow cloned the Shaun Of The Dead star.

Like the other Underworld movies, Rise Of The Lycans is ultimately mindless entertainment, but it is so entangled in its own jumbled mythology that I can't see it really appealing to the casual viewer.

Didn't someone in the vampire hierarchy think, early on, that they were asking for trouble by putting their daylight security into the hands of a force-bred army of angry, superpowered, bestial slaves?