Underworld Awakening (3D): Movie Review

Kate Beckinsale from a still from 'Underworld Awakening'

Cast: Kate Beckinsale, India Eisley, Michael Ealy, Stephen Rea, Theo James
Direction: Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein
Cast: Action/Fiction/Thriller
Release Date: 20th Jan 2012(worldwide)

Kate Beckinsale reprises the role of a vampire warrior, Selene in the 4th installment of the Underworld series, Underworld Awakening. 

It comes to humans' knowledge that vampires and lycans (werewolves) exist. Considering they pose danger to the human race, it is thus decided that both clans need to be eradicated.


Selene attempts to escape imprisonment but gets captured by humans and is kept in cryogenic suspension for 12 years for scientific experiments. Selene manages to flee but encounters another 'subject' who has escaped the facility too. This happens to be Eve (India Eisley) a vampire and lycan hyrbrid.



As circumstances force Selene to save Eve from the lycans, the journey helps Selene unfold the death-defying truth that's been kept under wraps.

Underworld Awakening too takes the rivalry between Vampires and Lycans (werewolves who can take the form of humans) a bit further.

For those who haven't seen the previous installments, not to worry for you don't need to be filled in on the details to be able to comprehend this one. Awakening has pretty much a stand alone storyline with few references to the past, which too are explained towards the end. No unanswered puzzles in the plot make it an easy watch. But again, the plot seems some what stagnant and repetitive over the entire Underworld series.

Awakening's novelty lies in its 3D making and addition of graphical action. Coming to the 3D part, it does enhance the viewing experience but since the entire film's been shot with a bluefilter, it takes some time for you to getting used to watching the fast moving blue-black images. For the first 15 minutes, the eyes do hurt for the film stays dark and you feel blinded for quite some time with all the extra dose of darkness.

Don't expect too much from the story as the franchise is clear about its forte, genre and target audience. In these areas, Awakening excels. If you like video game-esque action, blood and gore, gothic fiction this is your film. The film's basic theme, slow-mo action shots, umpteen CGI effects will keep reminding you of Resident Evil franchise.

Kate Beckinsale as the vampire warrior who uses a gun to kill the werewolves is wooden yet decently effective. Her face is too soft, eyes too timid to turn into electric blue when she uses her fangs to bite her prey. But it's her petite body that fits perfectly into that leather corset which we believe explains her presence in the franchise. As an action main lead, Kate should study Angelina Jolie's work to get that posture, body language right. Beckinsale looks hot yes, lethal not really!

Special credit to the makeup department for the vampires look more authentic and fierce yet as glamourous as in Twilight!

Underworld Awakening has enough and more spellbinding action to keep you engaged. Frightening stunts and special effects are worth that theatre ticket. 

Contraband (2012)

• Release Date: 01/13/2012
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 1 hr 49 mins
• Genre: Action
• Director: Not Yet Available
• Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Kate Beckinsale, Ben Foster, Giovanni Ribisi

The nautical heist thriller Contraband is a remake of Reykjavik-Rotterdam, an Icelandic film from 2008 which, admittedly, I’ve yet to see. (It’s curiously difficult to find stateside.) Presumably, there must have been something about it that was compelling enough to warrant the effort and expense of an American adaptation. Whatever it was, it didn’t survive the no doubt complicated process of translating it into a proper Mark Wahlberg vehicle. 

Wahlberg plays Chris Farraday, once a legendary New Orleans smuggler but now happily law-abiding as a home-security contractor. The same, however, cannot be said of his punk brother-in-law, Andy (Caleb Landry Jones), who runs illegal shipments for a tattooed hoodlum named Tim Riggs (Giovanni Ribisi). When Andy makes the unwise decision to dump his valuable narcotics cargo in advance of a Customs raid, earning the dreaded pay-up-or-die ultimatum from his unsavory boss, Chris tries in vain to intervene on his behalf, only to be rudely rebuffed. Which leaves him with only one option to save Andy’s skin: One Last Job.

The director of Contraband, Baltasar Kormakur, actually starred in Reykjavik-Rotterdam – a piece of trivia which, unfortunately, proves far more interesting than anything found in his remake. It seems his familiarity with the material bred banality, if not necessarily contempt. His approach is a kind of Bourne-lite: the shaky-cam is restrained enough to minimize audience headaches, but the ultimate result is stultifyingly generic.

Essential to any successful Mark Wahlberg film, from Boogie Nights to The Fighter, has been to surround Wahlberg with more accomplished and versatile actors, thereby allowing him to focus on his core competencies of scowling, cursing, and otherwise radiating his unique brand of low-watt charisma. Kormakur assembled capable-enough performers for Contraband, only to saddle them with uniformly bland characters. 

Having grown accustomed to Kate Beckinsale as the leather-clad heroine of the Underworld films, I found it odd – and a bit disappointing – to see her reduced to the role of the protagonist’s fretful wife. Ribisi’s novel strategy for transcending his miscasting as a clichéd white-trash villain is to adopt a bizarre, high-pitched accent, presumably Southern in origin but unlike any Southern accent I’ve ever witnessed. Ben Foster plays Wahlberg’s best friend, an ex-con and recovering alcoholic who seems doomed to relapse on both fronts, if only because he’s being played by Ben Foster. Diego Luna, J.K. Simmons, Lukas Haas are underutilized in one-note roles. 

I confess to be unfamiliar with the vagaries of illicit foreign-goods transport, but I have to think it’s more exciting than what unfolds inContraband. No one expects it to rival the glamour and of, say, casino robbery, but Kormakur depicts smuggling with all the verve and panache of a tax audit. The film’s lone fireworks occur on land, during a stop-off in Panama City, when Wahlberg’s character is forced by the local crime boss (Luna) in an armored-car hold-up. A heist-within-a-heist, if you will. But soon it’s back on the boat, where the momentum ceases, and the movie sinks.