Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009)

A prequel arriving third in the Underworld cycle, Rise of the Lycans sets its gothic machinery in motion two decades before the feud that launched the franchise, and it does so with the grim efficiency of a film that knows exactly which buttons it was hired to press. The Lycans are a slave caste, shackled by day to guard the vampire fortress and released at night to labor for their aristocratic masters. The council trades silver tributes with human nobles for protection, and the whole arrangement carries the texture of feudal exploitation, not modern boardroom villainy. When Lucian finally leads the uprising, the result plays like Were-Spartacus, a comparison the film does not quite earn.

Rhona Mitra carries the picture as Sonja, a vampire who defies her father, trades her council seat to free her lover, and demonstrates a stubborn, insubordinate will. Then the script kills her in the sunlight so the male lead will have something to rage about, which undercuts the very agency it spent an hour establishing. The cast places a mixed-race lead and a Black supporting player inside an otherwise pale European fantasy, and the film treats this as ordinary, which is to say it makes no announcement of it. Kevin Grevioux, who helped build the mythology, appears as Raze and is handed a few lines and a very large axe.

The film declines to lecture. Its themes of bondage and liberation arrive through chains, whips, and a storming of the castle, never through speeches. There is no climate anxiety, no body politics, no neurodivergent subplot, no rewriting of actual history, and no romantic configuration beyond the heterosexual. The progressive content, such as it is, sits in the premise and stays there. A sommelier would call this a thin vintage with a long finish of CGI fog. It goes down easily enough and leaves almost nothing behind.