Underworld, B-

Not Blade, but Dagger.

Early 2000s vampire action/adventure flick that spawned into a franchise, thanks to the success of Blade and The Matrix. I, like many other millennials have seen bits and pieces of the film overtime thanks to TBS and TNT serialization, but Kate Beckinsale stars as Selene who is… basically gender swapped Blade. Just like in Blade, there’s a delegated emotional connection to a victim, and the hero character is in the middle of a centuries-long battle for supremacy in a feudal system. Both movies make allusions to slavery, where Blade was more humans as slaves to vampires but in Underworld it is more werewolves being slaves to vampires. They ratch it up a bit though by making the vampires prominently white vs the darker skinned werewolves.

All said, the movie is stylized once again extremely similar to Blade and The Matrix. 2000’s goth black outfits everywhere, enhanced with a color filter to take out most of the greens and reds in the sets (think Sin City). That style along with the… plot that Beckinsale brought to the table doesn’t make up for the fact that this movie is wayyy too long. At most the runtime should be 100minutes for something like this. Especially with how they buffed the runtime by recycling the living memory thing where the exposition was dumped. Would of been far nicer there.

Rescreened? December 12, 2025 on Tubi.