When did Congress pass legislation requiring that all sci-fi, comic book-based or futuristic movies be tinted blue? The cool, icy, filtered look that visual style that makes every actor look stricken with hypothermia and cloaks even daytime scenes in oppressive gloom has permeated every sci-fi fanboy flick from Blade to Equilibrium to Gattaca to X2. Even Steven Spielberg couldn’t resist turning his comparatively elegant Minority Report into a rhapsody in ice-blue. It’s the perfect visual shorthand for a dreary, doomed future.

Underworld, the new vampires-vs.-werewolves flick, appears to be set in the present day, but it remains so mired in its own gnarly, half-baked mythology that it’s often difficult to discern what world the movie is showing us, let alone what time period. First-time director Len Wiseman and cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts (who’s frequently worked with Merchant and Ivory, go figure) commit themselves whole-hog to the all-consuming blueness. If you’ve seen the ads with Kate Beckinsale, looking like a human bruise, gliding off a window ledge in a skintight leather catsuit, you’ve more or less experienced the film’s entire visual palette.

Beckinsale stars as Selene, a vampire warrior who leads the charge against the lycans (werewolves). Apparently the two races have been at war for hundreds of years, with the vampires achieving dominance after the death of Lucien, the werewolf leader. The vampires, however, don’t realize that Lucien (Michael Sheen) is actually still alive; he convinced the power-hungry vampire Kraven (Shane Brolly) to help him fake his death years before in order to carry on a scheme to merge the two races.

Lucien has been conducting experiments in merging werewolf and vampire blood. He targets Michael (Scott Speedman), an unsuspecting human, as his next subject, but Selene rescues the young man first. This sets the stage for forbidden romance, as Selene falls in love with Michael before realizing who he really is.

I can’t imagine a movie that makes the creepy/cartoony legends of the werewolf and the vampire any less fun than Underworld does. The characters in this movie barely drink blood. What’s worse, they spend most of the movie shooting at each other with guns. Granted, the bullets are made of either silver nitrate or ultraviolet radiation (don’t ask how), but why bother making a movie about werewolves and vampires if they’re just going to indulge in generic gunplay?

Underworld devises some malarkey about the victims of the lycans contracting their predators’ memories along with their disease, which serves to provide a shortcut in the storytelling later on. Danny McBride’s dialogue often sounds as if it has been translated from English to Japanese and then into English again. Sheen has fun, showboating like he means it. Beckinsale looks great (maybe she’d make a better choice for that upcoming Catwoman movie than Halle Berry), but she has nothing to play, and the spark she has shown playing smart, selfish, privileged young women (in Cold Comfort Farm and The Last Days of Disco) only flickers here. She has no time to develop chemistry with Speedman.

The best thing that can be said about Underworld is that, unlike many other action films, it’s possible to follow the action, which hasn’t quite been edited to smithereens. But it’s rote and stitled, and it’s never in the same area code as scary. Instead, it poses and preens like a wayward UPN pilot. I kept hoping for Buffy to show up and dust these vapid vamps.