Written by: Cory Goodman
Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Theo James, Lara Pulver, James Faulkner, Charles Dance
Rating: [2/5]
Bringing stories to a satisfying conclusion does not always occur with ease, especially when dealing with many characters, plenty of lore, and an already convoluted passage of events. However, that will not stop the terribly fun Underworld franchise from concluding as it saved its very worst for last in Blood Wars. A film trying to put a bow on everything but makes our farewell to these characters an underwhelming slog.
With vampires nearing the end of their run as Lycans hunt them down, they get persuaded to pardon Selene (Kate Beckinsale) for her crimes and train them for the upcoming battle with the long-time foes. While accepted back to the vampire coven, Semira (Lara Pulver) has her sights set on using Selene’s blood for her own ambitions as Lycans led by Marius (Tobias Menzies) desire to wreak havoc.
After all of the adventures we have taken with Selene from the first film and even delving back with a prequel to further add color to this larger world, with Blood Wars we return to the basics of the feud between the vampires and Lycans. They do not like each other and want to rid the world of each other, and now in this narrative, we get a bit of an expansion of different covens all playing out as we have nefarious characters operating here that Selene and her allies must take on.
While we can appreciate the efforts taken by the creative team to bring this overall saga to a conclusion, they certainly had no clue on how to cohesively piece everything together in a satisfying manner. With Awakening, they left plenty of questions left unanswered about what transpired with Michael following his release from captivity along with what will occur with Selene’s daughter. They knew they needed to provide some answers but it all gets handled in such a lazy way making it quite clear they did not have a clear picture on how to piece everything together. An obvious observation when looking at how it all plays out to the point where it feels a bit insulting that we spend so much time with Michael in the previous films that we get something so meaningless when we learn what happened to him. At that point, the ending just needed to put us out of our misery, but then we have Semira.
Of all of the underwhelming villains this franchise has offered to audiences the combination of Semira on the vampire side and Marius with the Lycans proved by far the most inconsequential. A duo of characters who just come in to serve their role as villains but do not add anything remotely interesting to the narrative. They come in as pawns but do not have any ambitions of consequence or anything relatively new to bring to what should embody this conclusion to a series of films filled with so much history and lore.
The villains of this movie can pretty much sum up the whole picture with its lack of presenting anything remotely intriguing other than further hybridizing hybrids to create more hybrids. If any more of these hybrids could become even more hybrids then this film would ensure it would present the option. Selene gets new powers just because and it all leads to action sequences that fall far below what we see in the previous films but managed to once again provide a base level of entertainment. With these new powers, we get something somewhat new but none of it leaves any sort of worthwhile impression.
While an admitted apologist for this franchise much like the Resident Evil movies, there comes a tipping point where we can no longer excuse them. Much like Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, when it came to wrapping up the party and for everyone else to go home these Screen Gems productions go out in bombastiaclly terrible style. Yes, we can have fun with them, but what we receive in Blood Wars displays an incoherent and barely enjoyable story to follow with wholly uninteresting villains. Reaching this point, the franchise has said all it wanted to and just needed to conclude to bring finality, and with that, we receive something lackluster. An unfortunate goodbye to the respectable action figure of Selene portrayed by Kate Beckinsale but it’s been due to be put to rest for a while and now it’s over.
Films with Josh 
