Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

A pointless stand-alone prequel to Len Wiseman’s vampire/werewolf movies, ham-fistedly helmed by sfx creator turned first-time director Patrick Tatopoulos, who should hang on to his day job. The digital video images are blurry, the fight scenes messy, the editing jerky, and the derivative plot absurdly overwrought (‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Spartacus’?).

A millennium before his death at the end of ‘Underworld’, Michael Sheen’s love-struck Lycan, Lucian falls for Sonja (slab-faced ‘Doomsday’ star Rhona Mitra), the rebellious daughter of vampire leader Viktor (Bill Nighy). If their illicit cross-species love affair is discovered, Sonja is toast, so the half-human Lucian embraces his suppressed blood-lust, unleashes his inner beast, and leads a Lycan slave revolt.

Set-bound and sluggish, this relies far too heavily on spasmodic bursts of bloodletting and variable CGI effects. If it is worth seeing at all, it is for the sterling contributions of its three leading British thesps: Nighy’s ham-on-wry imperiousness, Sheen’s straggle-haired ferocity, and Stephen Macintosh’s quietly effective turn as the sneakily ambitious archivist Tannis.