Blade Trinity
Script/Story: 3
Acting/Casting: 4
Action: 4
Humor: 5
Horror: 3
Eye Candy: 5
Fun Factor: 3
Replayability: 4
Overall: 3

I wasn't a big fan of the first two Blade films, but I didn't hate them. I haven't written a full review for Blade 1, and I gave Blade 2 a 4.5, but that was based on my first viewing. I'd probably give it a 6 or so now, after seeing parts of it several times. Neither of the first two films are really any good, and you never give a damn about Wesley Snipes' character one way or the other, but at least there are interesting bad guys in the first two Blade films, the secret world of the vampires and their internal political struggles are interesting, and Blade has some nice vignette battles against lesser vampires.

B3 tried to follow the same formula, but it didn't get there. The fight scenes are the limpest of the entire trilogy, the main bad guy (Vlad Dracul himself) is a pussy who never does anything special, there's nothing interesting about the vampire plans for world domination, Blade's curse of needing to drink blood is hardly touched upon, and there's absolutely zero sex appeal on the part of any vampires or their victims.

The remainder of this review is full of plot spoilers, since that's really the only way to talk about why this film didn't work. Stop reading here if you actually think you'll be seeing this one and still believe that not knowing what's going to happen will boost your enjoyment (it won't).

The plot, such as it is, involves the vampires filming Blade as he kills a thrall (the human assistant of a vampire), then releasing that tape to the media as part of an effort to get the cops after Blade. It's not clear why they're going to this much trouble; they appear to basically just want him dead, and if they can entrap him and film him murdering someone, they can surely put a few silver bullets into him just as easily. There are some mumbo jumbo mentions of how they want his blood, but if so why not shoot ambush and shoot him a dozen times with regular bullets, then capture him and bleed him at your leisure? Involving the FBI and the media seems insanely risky on the part of the vampires, since they obviously have a great deal more to lose than Blade does, if the general public somehow gets proof of their human-stalking activities.

Their plan works though, and Blade is eventually captured by the FBI during the least-organized raid since Waco. The FBI busts in with dozens of agents, all of whom demonstrate the shooting accuracy of Stormtroopers while Blade's long time partner Whistler blows them away with a shotgun, while hobbling around a vast warehouse lair in order to trigger some sort of memory wipe sequence on multiple computer work stations. There's no telling what's on those computers that Whistler is so worried about erasing, especially since he just blows up the entire warehouse in the end anyway, and it's laughably dumb that he would have so many separate workstations running without any central control. Not to mention that the FBI wouldn't cut the power as part of their huge coordinated raid. Or use tear gas before they burst in. Whey they didn't simply pick Blade and Whistler on the street, while they were carrying out their advance surveillance, is a question you're better off not answering.

Blade's captivity lasts about thirty seconds, just long enough for vampires to appear and menace him, before the never-before-mentioned Whistler's mother daughter and some other guy burst into the police interrogation room and rescue Blade, then spirit him away to their super high tech barge where the rest of their vampire-hunting posse lives.

Jessica Biel plays Whistler's bastard daughter, and her muscular sidekick is Ryan Reynolds. Reynold's character, ridiculously named Hannibal King, is sort of the narrator of the film, a decision I'd bet was made after they finished it and saw how bad it was. His voice over explanations don't help much, but they don't really hurt either.

The entire movie is chock full of "that could never happen in the real world" scenes, but the police station raid is near the top of the list. Blade's on the evening news every night, being depicted as this sociopath street killer. He gets captured by the FBI in a raid that claims the lives of dozens of agents, and yet goes right to some sort of local police station, where he's handcuffed in a chair while vampires with political power come in and shout a lot about transferring him to some asylum. Just as they're about to take him away, two heavily-armed people who have made no effort at all to disguise themselves smash through the glass wall of the interrogation room, revive Blade from the tranquilizer the vampire doctor drugged him with, and then shoot their way to the fire stairs, which are completely deserted and which let them exit right out to the street. (How boy/girl eye-candy Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel got up to the fourth floor of the police station while carrying small arsenals each, up to and including a bow and arrows, without setting off any alarms, while the most wanted criminal in the US was upstairs, is never explained.) They kill at least a dozen cops on their way to the stairs, which you'd think would concern Blade, since he surrendered rather than kill cops himself, since his weakness is that he actually cares for the stupid human animals. Or so says a vampire in every single film. Best of all, Blade's entire wardrobe, including the black leather cape, sword, guns, sunglasses, and more, were lying on a table right behind him in the police station, so he can instantly get back into costume.

Once outside of the police station Blade and company are picked up by an old SUV driven by another human, who immediately loses all police pursuit simply by driving down a couple of flights of stairs in a deserted public square. Helicopters? Additional units? APB for two mass murdering cop-killers who just busted the most wanted man in America out of a police station? Of course not, and in fact there's not another scene involving the police or the FBI in the entire film, during which Blade routinely walks around, undisguised, in broad daylight, despite the fact that he would then get more attention than Osama Bin Laden walking through Times Square with a ticking briefcase.


The other painfully dumb part involves Dracula. The film opens with a bunch of vampires climbing up into an ancient pyramid in some unknown desert. Once inside they stop and pull up one floor stone, which instantly causes a huge hole to open. They follow it down inside the pyramid, and after standing around a sandy area for a minute one of them notices a strange sort of sand whirlpool. A vampire is inevitably snatched into it, and as the metal-looking Dracula erupts from it and tears a vampire to bits, the scene ends.

We eventually find out that the vampires actually found Dracula, and that they want him because his blood is pure, or something, and they can analyze it and find a way to let themselves walk around in the daylight. Dracula can daywalk, since he's the first vampire ever, and his DNA is special and stuff. Why they want his blood is never explained, but then again, not much is. The blood of Dracula, for instance, since after an early mention about the vampires wanting it, they never take any or do any further research with it. They are not alone though, since there's a mention of the humans wanting some of his blood, since they have a brilliant blind scientist working on some sort of glowing yellow vampire poison potion, and if they can use it with Dracula's blood it could make a virus that would kill every vampire on earth. That plot line is forgotten as well, of course.

Dracula is a major disappointment in the movie, and the fact that he fails to become a worthy adversary to Blade is a real failing of the script. He's been buried for like 1000 years, apparently by choice, since he was just sick of killing and eating the lowly humans of his era. Yet when he wakes up he's ravenous, eating dozens of humans in very short order, and looking like some sort of monster, with a mouth a bit an Alien's, or like the steel maw of The Beast in Brotherhood of the Wolf. Minutes later, he's calm and civilized, and speaking perfect, modern English. What he thinks of the modern world and the vampires around him and Blade is never explored, since this is a very stupid movie.

Imagine a good movie, in which Dracula comes back to life in 2005. Talk about culture shock. What would he do first? What misunderstandings would arise? Would he expect to immediately seize control of the ruling party of the vampire nation? Would he want to return to the Carpathians and free his homeland from the Turks? Apparently he'd prefer to obsess over Blade while wearing a lot of open-throated shirts with cheap jewelry, while walking around the anonymous any-city the film is set in and menacing people. If he's got any culture shock about electricity, automobiles, skyscrapers, etc, he gets over it instantly. There is one scene that tries to be funny by having him enter some sort of kitschy S&M goth-mart, where they are selling every sort of Dracula-themed product imaginable. Breakfast cereal, stickers, wind up toys, vibrators, etc. Nevermind the fact that no such store has ever or will ever exist, and ignore the stupidity of the flirty schoolgirl skirt-wearing cashier, or her pointlessly rude co-worker; just concentrate on how stupid it is for Dracula to see and react to a few toys bearing a bastardization of his name, and not react to every technological improvement made in the last 500 years?

Dracula has one special power, that he can make himself look like anyone else for a moment. He does so twice, but both times it's stupid and unnecessary, to the point that you'd have been happier if they hadn't given him that ability at all. He never flies, or turns into mist, or bats, or any sort of animal, etc. He's just a beefy Eurotrash looking guy, the sort you'd expect to see escorting Paris Hilton at Cannes, who can turn into a sort of robo-vampire, with super metallic body armor and such. He never does so when it would help him win the fight, of course. He doesn't even appear to have super strength or anything like that, so he's just any other vampire who can walk in the sun, though of course he mostly wreaks havoc at night, since shadows are cooler on film, and come in handy to hide cheap special effects.

His abilities are odd, but much the same as those of the other vampires. Blade can leap from tall buildings and land without being injured, and I thought he could cling to the roof and such in the earlier films, but if so he's lost that talent now. The other vampires are very weird in their skills too; sometimes they seem to be super strong and powerful, other times they're so weak that a skinny white girl can push them around. The other main vampire is a sleazy looking white girl played by Parker Posey. She was formerly the lover/owner of Ryan Reynolds' character, back when he was a vampire, and she can throw people through walls with her birdie arms, but her huge and hulking idiot bodyguard, played by pro wrestler HHH, appears to actually be weaker than he would be in human form, given his steroid-grown muscles. It's all very confusing, as is the fact that no vampire ever wears any sort of body armor or chain mail or anything, or even takes cover when they know Blade is coming and that he uses guns that can kill them.

The film goes on and on, with Blade and company discovering huge warehouses full of humans who are being held in a Matrix-like plastic netting while their blood is harvested for the vampires to consume. They see it, tell the one worker to shut down the software, and walk away, sparring it not another thought after they curse about how the vampires have hundreds of such facilities, and how they are clearly winning their secret war against humanity. How about instead of doing nothing and losing the battle, they instead call the media out and instantly expose the Vampire menace to the entire world?

Finally, when they have the big battle at the end of the movie and Blade kills the head vampire in hand to hand combat (exactly as he did in the first two films, if you were somehow expecting a change this time around), and then the FBI comes busting in once everyone is gone and all of the vampires are dead piles of ash. The camera pulls back as day breaks, and of course the entire vampire building is glass and open to the sky. Just like in Blade 2, despite the fact that the vampires die instantly if they are exposed to the sun. In both cases Blade would have won anyway if he'd just stalled for another ten minutes, since he would have been saved by a Little Orphan Annie song.

I do have to mention one thing I liked in the film, and it was probably the single funniest thing in the entire series. The vampires had somehow made a trio of vampire dogs, including a ratty little Pomeranian. There were two Rottweilers too, all with the weird, gaping vagina-like mouths that the super vampires had in Blade 2, and the dogs' demise, though idiotic, was hilarious. They chased Ryan Reynolds's irrelevant character through the building, and broke a glass wall and fell to their deaths when he swung up onto a girder above the wall. And yes, we laughed loud and long at the sight of the Pomeranian sliding sideways across the floor and vanishing over the ledge. I actually grabbed the DVD control and reversed it to watch the dog skid over the side again, and I have never before done that while watching a movie for the first time. I wouldn't say the B3 is worth watching just for that scene, but it was certainly the highlight for us.

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