For a film intended to reinvigorate the Underworld saga, Awakening is, ironically, a soporific affair that might thrust a final stake through the franchise’s barely beating heart.

Swedish directors Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein keep the blood flowing in the orgiastic fight sequences, replete with slow-motion acrobatics and hyperkinetic editing that reduces skirmishes to an incomprehensible blur.

A newly introduced mother-daughter relationship, which convinced Kate Beckinsale to squeeze back into her skin-tight leathers as death-dealing vampire Selene, should pluck our heartstrings.

However, the step on her kick-ass leather boots has more depth than most of the characters in the film’s ramshackle script.

Fans who have followed Selene this far will hungrily sink their fangs into the fourth film, which jumps half-heartedly on the 3D bandwagon.

Alas, the blood flowing through the film’s veins isn’t fresh and Awakening’s cliff-hanger finale seems destined to remain unanswered.

The toothless fourth chapter opens shortly after events of Underworld: Evolution.

Governments around the world learn of the existence of Vampires and Lycans, and the bitter war that has raged unseen for centuries between the two immortal clans.

Humans hunt down bloodsuckers and werewolves in what becomes known as The Purge and Selene (Beckinsale) is captured in the melee.

She is imprisoned in cryogenic stasis in a laboratory run by Dr Jacob Lane (Stephen Rea), Global Director for Disease Identification.

Twelve years later, Selene is roused from her icy slumber by a 12-year-old girl, Eve (India Eisley), who turns out to be her hybrid daughter.

Mother and child escape and Lane dispatches his lupine henchman Quint (Kris Holden-Ried) and an army of Lycans to hunt down the girl.

‘It’s not a human child.

It’s not to be coddled or pitied.

It’s a blight of nature,’ the maniacal medic warns.

Selene and Eve seek sanctuary in the underground vampire coven ruled by Thomas (Charles Dance) and his son David (Theo James).

‘Eve is more powerful than any of us and they fear the day she discovers it,’ Selene tells her hosts, preparing for a titanic showdown against Dr Lane, aided by sympathetic police detective Sebastian (Michael Ealy).

Underworld: Awakening touches briefly upon themes of scientific meddling, genocide and inheritance but it would be folly to regard Marlind and Stein’s film as anything more than a miasma of pyrotechnics and slaughter.

Beckinsale looks sexy and mean as she discharges guns and nifty exploding discs of doom at her foes, while performing gymnastic feats in a costume that should chafe in all of the wrong places.

Rea forgets to deliver a performance and the visual effects team blitzkriegs our weary senses with werewolves that lack realistic movement.

‘If we are to survive as a species, we must resist the humans,’ Selene tells her fanged flock.

We in turn must resist Awakening.

• Release Date: Friday 20 January 2012
• Certificate: 18
• Runtime: 88mins