Monday, January 17

Sucky Movie

Last night, me and the ol' college buddies hunkered down in The Sanctum to chill, have our monthly dose of unhealthy pizza, soda and dessert, rummage through my stuff, and to talk about current events and old times. Somehow, even after all that, we still managed to watch the latest (and perhaps last) movie in the Blade series of films with Wesley Snipes. We watched the flick from a decently clear dvd, though the sound seemed oddly and slightly out of sync, making it kinda like an old kung fu movie. The third film, entitled Blade Trinity, has the 'Daywalker' Blade (half-vampire, half-human hybrid Snipes) returning with scraggly sidekick/weapons developer/mentor Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), still out regularly hunting vampires who prey on the human population.
The film begins though with a team of the bloodsuckers, led by evil hottie Danica Talos (Parker Posey), entering an ancient tomb in Iraq and finding something- scary. The CG monstrocity (which looks like a cross between Giger's Alien, Sauron from LOTR and the monster from Species) is actually THE vampire- the first of his kind, known to the world as... DRACULA.
Well, these days though, he's known simply as Drake (John Doe's Dominic Purcell), and for most of the film he appears as a foppy Euro-hunk. Not exactly the picture of Dracula you'd expect at all. Anyway, Drake 'allows' Danica and her crew to take him back to urban USA, where they concoct a scheme to take out their greatest enemy- Blade- and rule the world. In pretty short order, Blade is exposed to the public at large, hunted down by the authorities and left hanging in the wind alone.
But not for long. Blade Trinity marks the debut of The Nightstalkers, a network of vampire-hunters working in secret to aid Blade in fighting the bloodsucker threat. Chief among them are Abigail Whistler (a HOT Jessica Biel), ol' Abe's kick-ass daughter who loves killing vamps while listening to MP3s, and Hannibal King (Van Wilder's Ryan Reynolds), a former vampire who's equally at home shooting snappy funnies as he is shooting UV bullets. Despite some initial friction, Blade and the 'rookies' soon prove to be a potent team as they work to use the appearance of Drake as the way to defeat the vampire threat once and for all.

There are lots of good stuff in this movie. The action is still something to watch, though the quality of the fights is still markedly the least in the Blade series. Abby Whistler and Hannibal King are pretty cool characters, with King providing the movie with some pretty funny lines in between the action. However, we had our bones to pick.
For the most part, the fault lies in the baddies- Parker Posey's Danica Talos and her gang (including WWE superstar Triple H AKA Paul Michael Levesque as main henchman Jarko Grimwood) seem to drift around without really much of a plan, save to serve as straight men to Ryan Reynold's jokes. No one really stands out as too formidable (Triple H DOES get to do some wrestling moves, but is woefully underused- he's a LOT more menacing as his WWE heel persona). But the cake is taken by Drake AKA Dracula, who is simply the most unimpressive, not-scary, not formidable Dracula/Blade main villain in the trilogy. Stephen Dorff'sDeacon Frost in the first movie or Luke Goss' Nomak in Blade II, or even Ron Perlman's Reinhart were cooler, more dangerous and infinitely more fun than the Euro-trash man-whore main villain of Blade Trinity. Yawn.

In the end, we had a few laughs from Hannibal King, gaped at the hotness of Jessica Biel, watched the strangely by-the-numbers fights. Watching Trinity just made me glad that I decided to watch Kung Fu Hustle instead of this run-of-the-mill timesucker in the cinemas. Oh well.

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