Cleaning up the last straggler from Halloween, we come to the third and final feature in the Blade trilogy, Blade: Trinity, written and directed by David S. Goyer. Yes, I know there’s a DVD set that includes a fourth Blade film, but that fourth one is the pilot to the Blade TV series from a few years ago.
Not going into a lot of detail on this one, both because I’m trying to catch up on my posting and because the film is painful to relive. The film opens with several soldiers in desert fatigues with full face-mask helmets entering an ancient Sumerian crypt. They are vampires, and they are after something worse. An armored monstrosity that kills one of them immediately.
Meanwhile, Blade is doing what he does best, killing a bunch of vampires and looking badass doing it.
The battle runs from a warehouse down a freeway and finally concludes on a busy street, where Blade kills his final victim in full view of a video camera being wielded by… hey, it’s the chick from the crypt! She didn’t get killed!
Not so the final vamp in the street, who isn’t a vamp, it turns out. Blade is on camera killing a human being. He’s a murderer, y’all.
So Whistler chews him out about being careless, while Danica Talos (Parker Posey), the vamp who is setting Blade up, power-struts with the rest of the 2 Dead Crew.
Yeah, that’s pro wrestler Triple H in the background, and he is just as good as you’d think he’d be. The girl on the right is the woefully underutilized Francoise Yip, Jackie Chan’s love interest in Rumble in the Bronx. Danica Talos goes in to see the nasty evil creature they brought back from Syria, who turns out to be the uber-powerful progenitor of all vampires…
And he turns out to be just another John Doe.
I like Dominic Purcell usually. I liked him in John Doe and I liked him in Prison Break. He’s got a down-to-earth, whitebread appeal, but he’s not particularly charismatic. What I’m saying, if you need to cast a reasonably intelligent, not-too-threatening white guy in the modern day, Dominic Purcell is your guy. Â If you need to cast an immortal master of evil with a thirst for human blood and a yen for destruction, not so much.
Meanwhile, Whistler is lecturing Blade about taking too many chances, and then they’re raided by the FBI. Whistler sacrifices himself to keep the FBI from getting access to their computers, and Blade is captured.
Worse, some of his captors are actually vampire familiars who plan to ship him out with the 2 Dead Crew. Danica tells Blade that he’s all alone. “No one is coming to rescue you,” she says.
And of course, after a set-up line like that, you’ve got to have a punch line.
Punch!
Blade is rescued by a pair of young vampire hunters named Hannibal King and Abigail Whistler (Whistler’s daughter), played by Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel.
And once again, the casting disappoints. We’re looking for badass vampire hunters who can keep up with Blade, and instead we get the girl from 7th Heaven and the dude from 2 Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place. And yes, I know that they keep trying to shove Ryan Reynolds down our throat as an action hero, and yes, with his shirt off, he looks the part, but his turn as the wisecracking, funny member of the group is like the dictionary definition of “trying too hard.” And she’s just boring.
Anyway, exposition, exposition, exposition, confrontation, vampire apocalypse, secret bioweapon, need Dracula’s blood. Yes, they claim that Drake, the super-vampire, is in fact the inspiration for Dracula (and even show an issue of the Marvel comic Tomb of Dracula, the series which introduced Blade, by way of explanation). Oh, and we get a completely obligatory flash of Ryan Reynolds’s pubic hair.
Thanks a lot, film. Blade and Whistler head out to find the secret warehouse which houses the vampires’ bloodfarm, a concept that was cut out of the first Blade film and recycled here.
The concept is that eventually the vampires will turn everyone on Earth into a vampire and then have nothing to eat, so they’re shrink-wrapping survival rations ahead of time, just in case, or something.
While Whistler and Blade are out, Drake attacks the headquarters of the NightStalkers, kidnaps Hannibal and a little girl, and kills everyone else. While they’re waiting for Blade to show up, Danica and crew torture Hannibal while giving the girls a little fanservice by losing Ryan Reynolds’s shirt.
Rescue. Big fight. The effects are good, the stunts fairly uninspired, and the direction decidedly ho-hum. Although I do like the way Triple H’s ashified body falls through the slats in this window.
It’s not just that it’s by-the-numbers, but that it doesn’t seem to be that much bigger than what went before. The biggest problem with the movie is not that the big early twist (that Blade is revealed as a murderer for all the world to see) gets dropped almost as soon as Blade is rescued from the police station (there’s even one scene where he and his companions walk into an office building in full daylight openly carrying guns and a bow, drawing absolutely no reaction from passersby whatsoever). It’s that nobody in the movie seemed to have any fun making it. And it’s certainly no fun watching it.
