Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

Maybe it's just me (I've kind of always had a thing for wiry little British guys with an impish gleam in their eye . . . even before I learned to adore David Tennant as the 10th Doctor), but my sole criteria for deciding whether or not to see "Underworld: Rise of the Lycans" yesterday afternoon was the answer to the question, "Is Michael Sheen in it, and does he reprise his role of Lucian, the cerebral and sensitive (but very well-muscled) leader of the werewolf 'underdogs' from the first Underworld film?" The answer to that question being, "yes, yes, YES!", I went to the nearest multiplex yesterday after church and plunked down my seven dollars.

And darned if the film wasn't well worth the time and trouble! I highly recommend "Rise of the Lycans" for anyone who enjoys a good 'forbidden love story' between two supernaturally gifted and extremely agile protagonists in some distant and improbable mythical past. (And who doesn't enjoy one of those? Especially when Michael Sheen apparently spent a considerable amount of time and energy bringing his abs to such peak condition for our viewing pleasure?)

As anyone who saw the first "Underworld" has probably already realized, "Rise of the Lycans" is pretty much a prequel to the first film, recounting the story of how the blood feud between vampires and werewolves first began, and it mostly ignores the unnecessary complications to the mythos added by the second film "Underworld: Evolution" (which suffered from a complete and total lack of Michael Sheen/Lucian, as well as too much uncalled-for re-writing of the previous film's back-story, meaning that I'm mostly quite happy to forget the fact that I ever saw that one).

I admit that I can think of several more satisfying ways to develop the story from the end of the first film than what actually made it onto the screen in the 2006 sequel, and that at least one of the more intriguing options (for my taste, at least) includes the possibility of Lucian having already begun his own transformation as a result of combining Michael Corvin's blood with that of a pureblood vampire, before he was shot full of supposedly fatal silver.

Even if you've not seen the original "Underworld", the story of Lucian the tormented yet humane (well, compared to the vampire elder Viktor, anyway) werewolf and his love for the vampire noblewoman Sonja back in some mythical portion of early feudal Europe (which strangely resembles New Zealand) is well worth watching.

Having enjoyed Sheen immensely as Tony Blair in "The Queen" and as David Frost in "Frost/Nixon", I was delighted to see that he can still strip down to his skin with delightful results and 'wolf out' when he's in the mood for some not-so-historical story-telling!