director/screenwriter
David S. Goyer
based on
characters created by
Marv Wolfman
Gene Colan
producers
David S. Goyer
Lynn Harris
Wesley Snipes
cinematographer
Gabriel Beristain
music
Ramin Djawadi
The RZA
editors
Kirk Moses
Conrad Smart
Howard E. Smith
cast
Wesley Snipes (Blade)
Ryan Reynolds (Hannibal King)
Jessica Biel (Abigail Whistler)
Kris Kristofferson (Abraham Whistler)
Parker Posey (Danica Talos)
Triple H (Jarko Grimwood)
Natasha Lyonne (Sommerfield)
Dominic Purcell (Dracula/Drake)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 113m
u.s.
release: 12/8/04
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
see also:
- blade
- blade II
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In the third and, one hopes,
final installment of the Blade series, the eponymous vampire-hunting
hero (Wesley Snipes) is as stubbornly blank as ever. It's as
if Snipes and writer-director David S. Goyer (who also wrote
the previous Blade films) thought that even a flash of
humor, vulnerability, or humanity would compromise the
character's integrity. But the Blade of the original Tomb
of Dracula comics from the '70s wasn't afraid to joke around
or smile; he belongs, I guess, to a different era, when black
heroes didn't have to be scowling ciphers. Laurence Fishburne
in the Matrix trilogy, Samuel
L. Jackson in the new Star Wars
films, and certainly Snipes in the Blade movies -- these
are all fine actors with a knack for soulful, complex, funny
characters, but you wouldn't know it from these movies. Are the
white movie geeks who make these sci-fi/horror flicks reassuring
the white audience by robbing powerful black men of any personality?
Blade: Trinity is as much a piece of witless eye
candy as the other two, though director Goyer devises nothing
as inspired as the "blood bath" sequence that opened
the original Blade (1998) or
the hellaciously ugly übervamps in Blade
II (2002). The new movie is largely more of the same,
adding two characters -- Abigail Whistler (Jessica Biel), ass-kicking
daughter of Blade's mentor Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), and
Hannibal King (Ryan Reynolds), wise-cracking former vampire --
who function as T&A and comic relief, respectively. As written
here, Hannibal -- who in the comics was a vampire who assisted
Blade -- is actually closer in spirit to the Blade of the comics:
tough but witty, boldly contemptuous of vampires to the point
of turning them into punchlines.
Throughout this series, Goyer
has been fond of throwing in lots of mumbo-jumbo about vampirism
as a virus, political squabbles between "pureblood"
vamps and "turned" vamps, etc. Here, Blade is pitted
against Dracula himself, played by the beefy, profoundly miscast
Dominic Purcell, who looks more like a soccer goalie than like
the King of Vampires. In Dracula's blood is the vampire virus
in its purest form; apparently the bloodline has gotten diluted,
because Dracula regards today's bloodsuckers with disdain. Aside
from Dracula -- who, for his other trick, transforms into some
sort of vamp Sauron clone -- there's the snarky vampire Danica
Talos, an amusing role for Parker Posey, whose pale skin and
extreme widow's peak have always given her the look of a supernatural
vixen anyway. For random amusement, there's a vampire pomeranian,
though not, disappointingly, a pet of Danica's. (Posey's Best in Show co-star John Michael
Higgins turns up as a smarmy shrink who analyzes Blade.)
Goyer is better at writing
action scenes than at directing them; most of the fights go by
in a flash, goosed along by hyperactive editing and hampered
by cameras that seldom keep a proper distance. Blade: Trinity
often feels like a third-season episode from a nonexistent Blade
TV show, meant to introduce characters (Abigail and Hannibal,
dubbed "the Nightstalkers") that can be spun off into
their own series. It's also clear by now that Dracula should
never be used as a supporting player in another character's story
- in both Van Helsing and
in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer
episode featuring him, he came off as a hammy fop, and here he
has about as much menace as Stephen Dorff's Deacon Frost in the
first Blade, and without Frost's malicious wit.
Can much else be done with
the vamp-slayer subgenre? Back in the '60s, Roman Polanski's
The Fearless Vampire Killers turned the legends on their
heads -- who can forget the Jewish vampire unimpressed by the
crucifix? -- and recently such horror-comedies as Bloody
Mallory (from France) and Jesus
Christ, Vampire Hunter (from Canada) put some oddball,
farcical twists on the familiar narrative. But doing this sort
of film seriously, with its heroes lugging superior firepower,
doesn't give you much that you wouldn't get from a video game:
the vampires are reduced to soulless target practice. Blade himself
seems as soulless as his prey, too. It may be a plot point that
his status as a half-vampire cancels out normal human responses
to things, but it would be nice if we saw the man underneath
the scowl and the pose. As it is, he's more like half-vampire,
half-robot.
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