I have seen all the other films of this series, including the Rise of the Lycans prequel. I also want you to keep in mind the fact that I actually didn’t think that last one was actually all that bad. Was there anything surprising about it? No. I mean, obviously, considering it was just an extension of a flashback we’d seen in the first film. But I still found it entertaining enough. But what about this one? This time we get a direct sequel to the second film, and the world has now become aware that vampires and lycans exist. A war has begun between them and the humans. Somehow, Selene (Kate Beckinsale) is put in a cryo-stasis for 12 years until she awakens to find herself in a slightly different world than she had been in before. The company holding her, led by Dr. Jacob Lane (Stephen Rea), use her to find a young hybrid girl that had escaped named Eve (India Eisley). But she, meanwhile, teams up with a coven of vampires including David (Theo James) so that she can figure out what’s going on and find her lost love, Michael (not Scott Speedman).

Again, while most people felt blah over the second film and hated the third, I didn’t mind either (well, I remember not caring much for the second, but finding the third decent). So believe me when I say… this movie sucks. The biggest reason, first and foremost, is its story. Or many stories. Or lack of any cohesiveness in its stories. I mean, you have the waking up in the near future bit, which is kinda cool… except it would have been cooler had the war not started already prior to her cryo-freezing or whatever. There would have been a lot more to work with internally for Selene had there been an even bigger gap in realities. You have the story with her daughter (Oh, I’m sorry, was that a twist? I guess it wouldn’t have been obvious to anything without a pulse…). The CDC guys or whoever trying to get her back was all convoluted with a subplot that didn’t make much sense. There was the lycans subplot that kind of tied in to it. There was the vampire coven subplot with them not really accepting Selene but also kind of accepting her anyway. There was the search-for-Michael subplot that really goes nowhere except to set up a possibly sequel that may or may not happen. There was also the detective subplot, which was actually probably the most interesting. The film should have focused more on his story, maybe in conjunction with Selene’s acceptance o the world she’s now living in. It would have been much more interesting than what we were given.

And that ties into another issue… the movie is just dull. It tries to do so much that all the interesting aspects of each story negate each other (again, except the detective one) and just equal out to a boring flick. I could have forgiven a lot of things in this movie had it been interesting. I mean, you can have a convoluted plot that makes little logical sense and still have it be entertaining (see: Southland Tales). But what I hate the most is when a movie is just straight dull.

Even the visuals couldn’t save it. The CGI was terrible. Not Season of the Witch terrible, but still bad, nonetheless. The lycans in particular are just lazily crafted. Sometimes the lycans are actually done with puppetry, if I recall, but even that looked poorly done. And there are quite a few lycans in this movie. And when you’re tossing a lot of CGI at the viewer, and this CGI is supposed to be scary or intimidating in some capacity, it shouldn’t look silly or fake. And that’s just what it came off as in this movie.

To be honest, the film is kind of like a blur. I don’t remember it completely. It’s just kind of forgettable. It needed a lot more script revisions. The film just felt like they had a bunch of ideas on what the sequel could do and couldn’t decide which path to take… so it just took all of them. But then they couldn’t decide how to fit it all into a short time span, so they trimmed it all up and jammed it together and hoped something sensical came out of it. And, of course, that failed. It’s just a lazily made movie that could have had potential with a little more time and effort spent on it. Oh well. (Though I will say, the elevator scene(s) were pretty cool.)

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