“There is no beginning, there is no end. There is only becoming.”

Justin’s rating: Has anyone considered how messy and stinky blood is? Maybe don’t spill it and/or drink it?

Justin’s review: As I sit here and let the vapid nothingness of the fifth Underworld entry wash over me, I had to question why I felt the urge to put myself through this marathon. I guess it’s because I get the itch to do a good comprehensive run of a particular movie series once a year and speed-run what originally took years if not decades to deliver. While I always do these with the hopes of being moderately entertained throughout, the very nature of sequels means that I’m setting myself up for torture.

I really don’t get why any of these movies were that popular. We were all so gaga for the 2003 Underworld when it first arrived, probably because we were still high on The Matrix and were suckers for anything slick and with style. But it wasn’t a good film, and it sparked four more not-very-good-films as well.

Now that I’ve seen them all, I feel well-informed to say that the nutritional content of this series is almost non-existent. They’re dark, brooding, joyless exercises in action, gore, and — worst of all — exposition dumps about vampires and werewolves and covens and hybrids and wars and politics and a hundred other things I don’t care about. The only virtue to this series is in seeing some genre actors like Stephen Rea or Charles Dunce or Bill Nighy overact and the fact that the runtime of each movie decreases the further you go.

Picking up on the coattails of Awakening, Underworld: Blood Wars changes up everything yet again. Selene’s daughter Eve is put on a bus and sent out of this series, Michael returns but is a new actor, and the conflict with humans is largely forgotten. Instead, Blood Wars focuses on the tension between vampire covens as they also contend with a growing war against the Lycans.

Oh, and everyone hates Selene and wants her to die, but they also adore her and want her help, and so she keeps squeaking through scenes with her hide intact. She even takes up interns to train as future death dealers. They use holograms!

At no point was I ever clear what was going on in this movie, either visually (it’s so stinking dark) or narratively. People are always underground and always not happy about something. Selene completes a five-movie streak of never smiling. Would you, if you had to pee and were in a corset and skintight PVC suit?

We do get some scenery change about halfway through, trading up a non-descript eastern European city for an icy northern mountain fortress to meet ice vampires. It’s all still in the dark, though, which does rob the snow of some of its cinematic properties.

I find that these movies are all about biding time until people start fighting and the special effects come out to play. You’d think that in a 90-minute flick, there wouldn’t be much waiting, but there is here. And that’s because, as I’ve learned, vampires and werewolves love making tiresome speeches more than fighting.

But there is some fighting, and that plus the continuity and relatively similar budget to the other films means that this series didn’t completely tank in quality. How many genre films make it to part five without going direct-to-video or streaming or changing up the entire cast and jettisoning continuity? Not that many.

It’s not terrible. It just has nothing great to offer. If you’re OK with surface-level grudge matches between Twilight monsters and vow not to overthink any part of it, then Blood Wars might even give you a thrill or two. For me, this movie’s greatest contribution was releasing me from this series so that I might hunt for more worthy cinematic prey.

Intermission!

• All of these movies start with a recap and clip show
• OK, she has nothing, we get it. Maybe you could be one of them rare brooding vampires?
• A self-propelled bullet sounds nasty and improbable
• Vampires spend a lot on their candle budget
• Vampires have a holodeck for werewolf killing training. And cages for cage matches.
• The UV bullets taking apart vampires is really cool
• Race against the sun! Which doesn’t matter when you can walk in the sun.
• We get a blood-induced flashback to the scene we JUST SAW.
• Ice vampires! That’s slightly imaginative.