Blade: Trinity

Blade: Trinity is pretty much a mess. It's overlong (particularly if you watch the 124-minute director's cut on the new 2-disc DVD, as I did), it's frustratingly slow at times, and its action is chopped-up and shot so awkwardly as to be completely incomprehensible. I assume Blade keeps winning fights, because he never seems to get hurt, but exactly how he's laying waste to entire armies of vampires remains a mystery.

Director David Goyer, who wrote the scripts to the first two Blade movies (along with 1998's phenomenal Dark City), only has one other film under his belt, and his amateur status definitely comes through here. The movie's just clunky, its pieces don't fit together well.

Wesley Snipes has portrayed Vampire Hunter B for 3 films now, and he hasn't really developed the role at all. The character's a blank slate, an emotionless fighting machine who doesn't even seem amused when he's cracking one-liners. The first film was kind of a dud, a nice-looking but thoroughly generic affair. The nicest thing I can say about the original Blade was that it provided mass audiences with a rare opportunity to check in on the human train wreck known as Stephen Dorff. This guy is a burnout by Hollywood standards, okay, people?

Anyway, with Blade 2, the producers and Snipes had the massive savvy to hire Guillermo del Toro, the rather brilliant genre director behind Cronos and The Devil's Backbone and a little movie you may have heard of called Hellboy. So, yeah, Blade 2 ruled. Not really because the universe was made deeper and more interesting, or because of anything in the Snipes performance. But because Del Toro recreated the world of Blade to really resemble a comic book panel, filled with pastel colors, dramatic lighting and crazy, disorienting angles. And because he infused the movie with a real sense of zany fun. He made a silly, gory, exciting, action-filled, occasionally hyperactive vampire movie, which is really all you can expect from a movie called Blade that stars Wesley Snipes as a half-breed vampire.



And now David Goyer takes over the series and makes it maudlin, confusing and dreary. He crams the film so full of stupid plot, there's barely any time for killing, and even less time for humor or, hell, any sign of personality. In addition to making Blade a fugitive from justice, he adds a group of Buffy-ish slayers called the Nightstalkers, a fugitive gang of vampires seeking to reanimate Count Dracula (yeah, I know...), a subplot about a virus capable of wiping out vampire-kind and a wacky twist that turns the whole franchise on its ear.

I mean, why make a Blade movie that unfolds in this way? It should be so simple...There's a bunch of evil vampires and Blade has to fucking kill them. The best thing about the second Blade was its simplicity...There's a new strain of vampire called a Reaper, that feeds on other vampires. So Blade teams up with vampires to go kill Reapers. DONE. By the end of the film, when the plot's become more complicated and a variety of twists are thrown in, it becomes a lot less interesting.

But this wealth of exposition could have been offset if the new characters fit better into the Blade universe. Unfortunately, they don't. As in Amityville Horror, Ryan Reynolds just sticks out here. I have no idea why they're trying to make him into a genre hero. This guy belongs in romantic comedies and maybe, MAYBE, dramatic roles in action or adventure films...but not as a psycho killer and certainly not as the heroic warrior slaying vampires and hunting Count Dracula. I mean, come on, I shouldn't even have to say this stuff...

Other members of the Nightstalkers are Whistler's daughter, played by the ever-fetching Jessica Biel, who continues her career plan of looking sexy in a long string of unspeakably awful movies. From Summer Catch to Rules of Attraction to the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Blade: Trinity, you have to admit that she's consistant. Her character here is the vehicle for perhaps the most egregious product placement I have ever seen in a mainstream film.

TOP THREE MOST EGREGIOUS USES OF PRODUCT PLACEMENT IN A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

3) Heineken in the Austin Powers movies. I mean, that's really embarrassing. The whole first 10 minutes of Goldmember is like watching a Heineken ad. An unfunny Heineken ad that somehow features both Tom Cruise and Kevin Spacey.

2) The scene in the new Thomas Crown Affair where Rene Russo slugs an entire can of Pepsi One for no discernable reason. It was like Rene Russo had been paid to do a Pepsi spot and hadn't told anyone else on the set.

1) Jessica Biel's character being entirely defined by her iPod.

Yes, that's right, the only effort made at all to give Whistler's daughter a personality is that she owns an iPod. See, she likes to listen to mp3's while she kills vampires, Ryan Reynolds helpfully explains. And just to make sure we get the message, before every fight scene, there's a handy montage showing us Jessica uploading songs onto her little white mp3 player. If you look closely, you can even see that Whistler's daughter enjoys listening to trip-hop, which is, like, so hot right now.

So, let's see...what else pissed me off about Blade: Trinity...Oh, I got it.

This film, much like the first Blade, suffers from a massive case of Eurotrash Vampire Syndrome (or EVS). I blame Anne Rice.

See, before Anne Rice's popular vampire novels and the popular film based on them became the standard for American undead literature, vampires used to be actually scary. Sometimes they morphed into hideous monsters, lots of times they looked kind of like zombies or corpses, all that good stuff.

But then Interview With the Vampire came out, with its foppish vampire dandies trying to suck blood without soiling their embroidered garments, and everything got all pussified.

Now, I'm not saying there's no room anywhere for sophisticated, urbane vampires discussing the metaphysical ramifications of eternal life while ballroom dancing in a decaying Victorian castle. I'm just saying that it has become a bit tired as a concept. I'm sick of seeing the same kind of vampires in every movie.

Blade: Trinity is filled with scenes that give us a peek behind-the-scenes at the secret world of vampires, and it looks a lot like a lame Hollywood club appealing to goth kids. Everything's black, there's candles, people are in leather and have lots of piercings, and lots of people have Bavarian accents for some reason. In this film, the sleek, uber-cool vampire crew is headed by Parker Posey and pro-wrestler HHH, who try their best to inject some vitality into their characters but have no success. Their scenes are totally flat, which is depressing to see from Posey, who is capable of being so dynamic on screen and should be having much more fun playing a sinister ghoul.

So, there you have it. Nothing much to see here, folks. I think this series has just about run out of juice, unless there's another exciting, visionary director out there with some new take on this material. Or at least a new way to sell iPods.