I recently re-watched the 2003 movie Underworld, which features werewolves and vampires in a centuries-old dispute. I recall seeing it before, probably around when it was released, but re-watched it and then the next two movies (which were new to me). I thought Underworld: Rise of the Lycans was the best of the three; I haven’t watched Blood Wars yet. That said, I found that Underworld required… commentary. To be fair, I rated Evolution about the same, but I was already past the commentary stage by then. (There are spoilers.)
The opening fight of Underworld has the main character running in a trench coat, which always seems terribly impractical. I suppose it’s better than running with a trench coat and having a sword hidden in there. Beyond the whole running in a trench coat thing, it bugs me that all they did to define the vampires was attire them as goths… they didn’t look that pale and didn’t seem particularly interested in dining… blood was reserved for combat.
Their combat tactics sucked. Both sides shot like stormtroopers. (And died like redshirts, which, frankly, serves them right for shooting custom-designed bullets like stormtroopers.) The vampires failed to work as cohesive units, paused at really stupid points to stare one direction so somebody could attack them from another, and generally didn’t behave like they’d been fighting these battles as a team for centuries. And who stands around waiting for their opponent to finish transforming into a better fighter? Well, maybe a Paladin… but we’re talking about vampire combatants here, patiently waiting on a shapeshifting werewolf.
The plot twists were pretty obvious in that Craven was, well, craven, and Viktor wasn’t anything resembling a good guy. So really, it was a poorly scripted adventure where the gamemaster had to fudge a few rolls and hand out obvious plot points to make sure the players won. Throw in a few instances of the gamemaster being super descriptive about physical changes, like Viktor waking up, probably because they needed to drag out the game that day because they had prepared the stats for a combat session.
Both vampires and werewolves are supposed to have improved hearing and speed, yet are capable of sneaking up on each other and letting a mere human get away at several points. Either nobody put points into Awareness, or all the players repeatedly botched their rolls.
In other words, it was basically an entertaining movie that would certainly be worthy of an MST3K take on it, or a movie night with friends and drinks.