OK. We saw a super special sneak preview of the movie Underworld last night.
If you don't know, here's the plot: There's all these vampires and werewolves, and they hate each other, and there are big gamer-type plot-machinations in swing, and they fight and there's a war and people get shot lots of times.
And therein lies the problem. It's like an RPG plot. The plot of an RPG is only fun because you get to decide what happens. You get to control one of the crappy, one dimensional, puffy faced, pale-ass characters on the screen, and make them do things. If you think it would have been cooler for the vampire girl to have had some guile of her own, perhaps to have had something resembling a subplot (in a whiny voice: "Everybody else got one, where's mi-i-i-ine?"), you could arrange that. Not in a movie. In this film, you can tell who's a bad guy, because there was only one good roleplayer in the bunch, and he was running the damn game. All of the NPCs have a little depth. All of the PCs (I'd argue that there were four, two regular and two who showed up for about three sessions in the campaign, never at the same time) are simple, like they were defined by numbers on a sheet instead of what we like to call "character."
OK, so that's a little bit of the overall criticism. What was good about this movie? The action wasn't bad. I don't like the idea of a half ton, 12-foot-tall wolf beast walking on plaster walls, but it was relatively effective in making you think, "Gawsh. Somebody at Sony owns a computer." There were some nifty big fight scenes, and some nice "guy shooting people" scenes. Lots of guns were fired. Lots of bit characters died, some of them twice, I'm pretty sure. I commented to Toshi, "Well, it's loud, I'll give it that." That sums it up, I think.
The fact that some of the movie was pretty tolerable, I think, is why it can't achieve greatness. It has all the ingredients to be a new SuperNova (the movie by which all other bad movies are judged. The worst of the worst. Worse, even, than Manos.), but it just never quite gets all cylinders misfiring at once. It's a big-budget movie with a bad script. It's got half-assed performances from people who don't look "movie pretty." It's got a gratuitous naked ass. It's hyped so hard it hurts. It's a bad series pilot masquerading as a movie. It just never quite matches Supernova for badness. It actually rates higher than I think it deserves (how 'bout them apples?), because of the small amount of stuff that didn't manage to suck.
This next paragraph is a little bit of a spoiler. Be aware. If you're going to see the movie, be aware, there's this spoiler in the next paragraph.
The bad guy dies. I know, I know, it's a big fat fucking shocker that the "good guys" in the movie win. Get over it. The bad guy has a terrible death scene. It is stupid. It is a big pile of badness. The death scene there at the end of the movie is suckedness warmed over. It's what happens when a scene in a bad movie gets a lobotomy. It's exactly what you're afraid it will be, and then some. Suck suck suck, suck suck suck suck. Did I mention it made the rest of the movie, which was bad, seem better? It was like chewing on tin foil and then being shot. After you get shot, the tin foil seems not so horrible. It was like being poked in the eye with stupid badness. It was crappy. The end of the story, before the set-up for the sequel (god forbid. God Forbid. GOD fucking FORBID.), is just a big pile of badness wrapped in week-old stupid. I mean, she jumps past him and his head falls in half. The audience cheered. I like to think they did this because it meant the movie was over. Probably, it was more puerile than that.
This is a movie that substitutes bad special effects for story. It does so in the accepted way. It will be lots of people's all-time-favorite movie until 3fast3furious hits theaters next summer. It had potential, but never got quite as bad as SuperNova. I could see it strain to be the worst movie ever, but it didn't quite make it. I'm sad to see such potential wasted. In another universe, I might be rating movies in Underworlds. Sadly, though, this one is only

950MilliNovas. Bad, but not the worst. I'd posit that this isn't even as bad as Manos (clocking in at a whopping 998). It's pretty much on a par with Jesus Christ:Vampire Hunter (940, but it's supposed to be sucky). If you get to see it for free, you'll get most of your money's worth. If you pay for it, you'll pay too much.
More reviews soon.