Surplus of money is always apparent in blockbuster action movies.  Whatever one reads in the press about stratospheric star salaries, exotic location shoots that go long, and carpet-bombing ad campaigns, usually the final proof is onscreen in the form of F/X for the sake of F/X. A recent example is “Terminator 3” in which two of every three special effects shots were completely gratuitous.  Surprisingly, CGI has been a bane to movie audiences precisely because it gives filmmakers so much visual freedom.  When the imagination is as unfettered as the budget, the result usually looks like the director wanted to take the new computers out for a spin rather than tell a decent story.

“Underworld” is the obverse of the cash-heavy blockbuster.  Certainly it is a bad movie, but good enough that it warrants a special subcategory of bad: underfunded. Len Wiseman and screenwriter Danny McBride obviously wanted to tell a story in “Underworld”, and the shame is that a host of interesting ideas had to be truncated or left totally unexplored because of what looks like a lack of money.  The basic idea—“vampyres” and “lycans” in a century-spanning war—has enormous potential. Age-old monster myths given a facelift, a slew of gadgets, and cross-pollinated with other movie genres (war, revenge, courtly drama) should have provided a lot more thrills and eye-candy than we actually get.  The vampires have almost no special skills or abilities, the werewolves have a meager handful of transformation scenes, and disappointingly both resort to human weaponry— automatic pistols and harsh looks, mainly— to do their dirty work.  Before the invention of gunpowder, these two species must have had some really boring fights involving lots of sneering and teeth-baring before quickly degenerating into a slapstick barn brawl.  So much for the aristocracy of vampires.

To compensate for the shriveled special effects budget, Wiseman uses a lot of B tricks, mostly camerawork.  He can’t show the lycans, so they hide in shadows and pop out for half a second before getting blasted.  He can’t show a full medieval battle scene involving a sunstroked vampire, so the scene is shot in a blurry wobble.  Fights are sliced and diced into utter incoherence and then steroided up by Wagnerian foley artists.  And the uber-vampire/lycan, which should have been the film’s coup de grace, comes out looking like the Incredible Hulk after a month on the Atkins diet.  At least they could have bought some scrunchies for the vampires.  Half of them had hair that looked like the Fab Four after twelve hours in a sauna.  Wiseman has the gritty know-how to patch up these bald spots to the point of respectability—just—but, as they do in all glue-and-tape monstrosities, the tricks begin to distract from the story at hand.

The story: here’s where a few dollars would have helped in the rewrite department. “Underworld” has a compelling tale about a millennia-spanning war between royal houses, but animates its people with the silliest kind of psychological puppetry: backstories involving bereavement.  It’s Character Motivation 101: family member murdered! Revenge! Mayhem! Heroic faces darkened by the Frown Meaningful!  By the climax, already anticipating the end credits with increasing eagerness, you begin to fear that one of the henchmen, instead of dropping from a round of machine gun fire like he’s supposed to, will step forward with a speech like “I recall the day my Aunt Agatha was eaten by a lycan...Never again, I swore!”  Forget the fancy bullets and oleaginous leather.  There’s nothing in “Underworld” a weekly encounter group wouldn’t cure.

Even the interesting parts of the script leave far too many questions unanswered. Why does Kraven, one of the oldest of the lot, speak in an American accent considering he was born several centuries before Concord and Lexington? Why would anyone with half a brain turn his back on a power-hungry weasel named Kraven? That’s just what happens when Lucius (dignified by the wonderful Michael Sheen) turns his back on Kraven at a key moment and pays the price with a hail of silver bullets in the back. More: Why do American cops drive around with European license plates, and what are two American medical interns doing in Hungary? Why does “brainy” Selene chain Michael to a chair and then give him the means of escape— a gun, to shoot off the chains— and walk out?

These slips aside, the script does have one great touch, that of the wizened Elders catching REMs for a few hundred years before coming back to rule for a spell: how pleasant to see Hollywood pay tribute to Strom Thurmond so soon after his passing!  Thank goodness Wiseman isn’t a Dogme director or we’d have had to watch Victor easing his bladder for twenty or thirty minutes. As with other apocalyptic sci-fi/monster movies, like “Blade” and “The Matrix”, there’s a crudely rendered commentary on current affairs.

In “Underworld”, just like all the others, it’s the “j’accuse” of the rock ‘n’ roll disenfranchised.  First clue: Selene mentions that no one may question the Elders by reading history.  Lunchroom conspiracy theorists are always quick to point out that the temerity of actually reading a history book is a terrible blow to the establishment’s stranglehold on their individuality.  Next we find out that, naturally, the Elders have been hypocritically violating their own rules all along.  How?  Their power structure (“we must follow rules, Selene”) is really an attempt to keep (allegedly!) lower species as slaves, and there’s a big tsk tsk handed out to the miscegination prohibition.  History, tradition, aristocracy: all power systems ready to be shattered by the earnest young men and women who “aren’t going to take it anymore”. Cue hair whip.

The point is made bluntly—and uncomfortably—when one of the movie’s two black characters, a lycan (and hence a slave descendant), rears up in self-righteous rage against a vampire cracking him with whips.  It’s an ersatz revolutionary tract for disgruntled skateboarders. Which is precisely why a woman’s touch was so desperately needed. Unfortunately Kate Beckinsale was a greater help behind the camera than in front of it: thanks to her performance, the film’s editor must have had no problem with coverage. As in “Pearl Harbor”, her emotional range careens wildly between a pout and a frown. Every shot of her looks exactly like all the others. Now, Selene’s one-note “intensity” might be explained by cosmetic surgery—one shudders to imagine the staggering number of operations a thousand-year old woman needs to hold on to the sweet bird of youth. Still, when the Elder Vampire Victor wakes up after a few centuries to her wan scowl it’s no wonder he’s a tad grumpy. What a sourpuss, that Selene.

Perhaps Beckinsale is waiting for the sequel, announced by the movie’s preposterous epilogue, to unleash her megawatt smile— you know, for character development.  It would get my ten bucks.  But no. Beckinsale should return to the awful drudgery of being a world-class beauty gracing light romantic comedies with her effortless charm.  Ah, the tragic fate of some people.