The Underworld series deserves its 6.5 as the most successful attempt to turn the vampire into a pure action franchise, a five-film saga of vampires versus werewolves that prioritizes leather, gunfire, and gothic style over depth or scares. Beginning in 2003 and running through 2016, the films built a dense mythology around a centuries-old war between aristocratic vampires and bestial lycans, with Kate Beckinsale’s leather-clad vampire warrior Selene at the center of nearly all of them.
The series is shallow, repetitive, and ridiculous, and it’s also slick, committed, and entertaining on its own action-horror terms. As a whole it’s more than the sum of its uneven parts. I like this series more than I can fully defend. It’s silly, it takes itself far too seriously, and Beckinsale in that catsuit with two pistols delights me anyway. The 6.5 is me splitting the difference between how much fun the good entries are and how much homework the later ones assign.
This is vampire cinema as blockbuster spectacle, with little interest in the genre’s traditional themes of seduction, tragedy, or dread. Judged by the standards of the art-house and classic vampire films, it’s lightweight. Judged as a stylish action franchise that knows exactly what it is, it largely delivers, and its commitment to its own absurd world has earned it a devoted following.
The Vampire as Action Hero
The series’ defining contribution is its transformation of the vampire from seducer or monster into action hero. Selene is a Death Dealer, a vampire warrior who hunts lycans in a black leather catsuit, wielding dual pistols and moving with balletic, gravity-defying violence. The films treat vampirism primarily as a source of superhuman combat ability, and the vampire becomes a gun-toting action protagonist in a gothic-industrial world of blue-filtered nightscapes and endless rain.
This was an influential reframing, arriving alongside other turn-of-the-millennium attempts to make the vampire an action figure, and it found a large audience. Kate Beckinsale leads the series with real commitment and physical presence, taking the absurd material seriously enough to sell it, and Selene became an icon of the action-horror hybrid. The films are superhero movies with vampires, and their willingness to fully embrace that identity, with elaborate fight choreography and comic-book mythology, is the source of both their appeal and their limitations.
Beckinsale is the reason any of this works for me. She never winks at the audience, and a lead who treats a werewolf war like a job she’s very good at is far more fun to watch than one who’s in on the joke.
The Mythology and the World
The series’ other notable feature is its dense, self-serious mythology. Across the films, the saga builds an elaborate history of the war between vampires and lycans, with bloodlines, ancient elders, betrayals, and a sprawling backstory that the films treat with complete gravity. The second film and the prequel in particular dig into the origins of the conflict, and the series develops a real internal coherence, a fully realized fictional world with its own rules, factions, and history.
This world-building is both an asset and a liability. The mythology gives invested fans a real saga with stakes that accumulate across films, and I like that the series commits to it. It also buries the simple pleasure of vampires shooting werewolves under exposition, and this is where the series loses me.
Whenever a film pauses a fight to explain another bloodline, I start wishing somebody would just pull a trigger. The world is impressively built and badly overexplained.
The Uneven Entries
Across five films the quality varies considerably. The original Underworld established the world and the style and remains a solid, atmospheric action-horror film, if a derivative one.
The second film expanded the mythology with diminishing returns. The third, a prequel, told the origin story with more tragedy and many consider it the strongest, partly because it set Selene aside for a fresher story. The fourth and fifth films saw clear creative exhaustion, recycling elements with declining energy and inspiration.
This unevenness is the nature of a long-running franchise, and it means the series is best appreciated selectively instead of as a uniform whole. The strong entries deliver action-horror entertainment, while the weaker ones coast on accumulated mythology and brand recognition. The supporting cast across the films includes real talent, with Bill Nighy memorably hammy as a vampire elder and Michael Sheen committing fully as a lycan leader, lending the saga more gravity than it strictly earns.
Bill Nighy is my favorite thing in the entire series. He chews through every scene like the cranky patriarch of a very old family, and Sheen matches him snarl for snarl. I’d happily watch a whole film of the two of them and skip the fourth and fifth entries altogether.
The series rewards fans of its world while testing the patience of casual viewers as it wears on.
Is Underworld Series (2003-2016) worth watching?
The Underworld series gets its 6.5 as the most committed attempt to turn the vampire into a pure action franchise, a five-film saga of vampires versus werewolves that delivers leather, gunfire, and gothic style with real conviction. Kate Beckinsale’s Selene is an icon of the action-horror hybrid, the dense mythology gives the world scope, and the strong entries deliver slick, entertaining spectacle. It loses points for shallowness, repetition, increasingly convoluted lore, and clear creative exhaustion in its later films.
Lightweight by the standards of the genre’s classics, and I think it’s good at being exactly what it set out to be.
The first film and the prequel are the ones I’d put on. The fourth and fifth feel like the studio kept the lights on after the party ended. That split is why I land at 6.5: I enjoy the good ones and resent the time the tired ones ask for.
