Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (R, 2009)

The first two Underworld films have been guilty pleasures for many moviegoers, and while Underworld: Rise of the Lycans features much of the same blood-drinking, neck-biting Romeo-and-Juliet Gothic romanticism of the first two films, it lacks the goofy pleasures of the first two movies' monsters-in-our-modern-world setting.

Sheen (who's far from the prestige of films like The Queen and Frost/Nixon here) makes for an adequate male lead -- haunted, heroic, hairy, and hunky -- while Mitra evokes some of the pouting hauteur that Kate Beckinsale brought to the earlier films. But Underworld: Rise of the Lycans never quite has the guts or glory to be much more than what it is: a bloody-but-bland cash-grab of a prequel made on the cheap in the name of a quick buck.