Blade: Trinity

It's sort of hard to believe that the guy most responsible for this mess co-wrote two of the best comic book movies ever with Christopher Nolan. Then again, he co-created FlashForward, so maybe it isn't that surprising. David S. Goyer wrote the whole Blade trilogy, though this is the only time he directed his own work. To be clear, I think this movie is more of a failure on Goyer the writer's part than Goyer the director. If the story wasn't moronic, I would have been fine with the general film work at hand here. Then again though, was Ryan Reynolds such a failed character because he was written poorly or directed poorly? It's hard to tell. He's his general wisecracking self in this movie, and it's only the addition of a beard and muscles that makes him at all different from his usual comedy work. And I usually like that persona for the most part. But I don't here. Really, I didn't like almost anything.

The vampires' big plan in the beginning is to get Blade arrested... because of... something. It all amounts to a hill of beans because his new hip and sexy friends bust him out and introduce him to their merry band of vampire hunters. Jessica Biel obnoxiously listens to an iPod while fighting (good job inhibiting your senses in the middle of combat!) and lets vamps think they've got her for no other reason than to play to the camera when she takes them out. Patton Oswalt puts in the most disappointing cameo of his career, showing little gumption and then disappearing from the film without so much as a death scene. The previously mentioned Reynolds tells bad jokes and shows a bit of pube when he reveals to Blade that he was once a vampire, but had been cured. Wait, what? You can cure vampires? So why are you guys killing all of the ones you come across? Cure more! There are a couple other good guys but the movie didn't care about them so neither do I.

So anyway the vampires resurrect Dracula as a beefy, bald dude named Drake (no really, they do that) who's played by the meat head older brother from Prison Break (the one who can't act at all, not the one who can barely act) and kind of acts like a giant puss the whole time even though he's fucking Dracula. People get captured, stuff happens, and then there's a fight where all the bad guys die. The action isn't really incompetent, but it isn't exciting enough either to come close to saving the movie from its completely ineffectual and uninteresting story. I wasn't invested at all and the only time that changed is when it occasionally managed to downright piss me off. It's just one of those films that I can't imagine anyone caring about and don't really understand why they bothered to make it.

Blade II

While I was in the middle of reading all those Marvel comics recently, I had the idea to go back and see all of the recent movies that I missed based on characters from that universe. Basically the last decade. Blade II was Marvel's first sequel film, and I ended up liking it more than I anticipated, mostly thanks to the strong visual sense of director Guillermo del Toro. I could take or leave most elements of David Goyer's plot and the new characters (except the vampire with the wrap-around mustache played by Ron Perlman, who's awesome regardless of how stupid his role is), but it was still an entertaining, gory action movie. Boiled down, there's a new strain of vampire that feeds on its own kin, and they decide to team up with Blade to find a way to stop them before they take over the world. But just in case you're wondering, things aren't what they seem.

The movie's success rides a bit on whether you like the new super vampires. The only reliable way to kill them is exposure to sunlight, which means not many scenes of Wesley stabbing dudes in the chest and them exploding after the plot begins. There's still some pretty damn competent fight scenes, they just tend to all end in the same way. The bad guys have this weird sideways opening jaw thing that's pretty grotesque, and the film definitely revels in scenes where they get chopped up and dissected. It's not really disturbing though, it's too far separated from human anatomy to cause revulsion and just results in some interesting practical effect stuff. The plot takes some predictable turns - he gets betrayed, he gets hooked up to a machine that drains his blood, he kills a lot of guys... and then it's over. There were a few issues here and there, like some truly dreadful CGI that was supposed to make certain shots especially impressive but eight years later just sucks out all the believability, and there's a pointless flourish at the end that thinks it's a lot more clever than it is. Blade leaves a vampire alive at the beginning, and then he shows up again in the final scene so Blade can remind the audience of the connection and then kill him. But what was the point of that? Did Blade know they were making a movie about him and wanted a callback at the end? What if that vampire drained and killed like three people since he let him go? Pretty dumb! But I enjoyed this movie about as much as the original.

FlashForward

Well, that was a big waste of time. FlashForward was a show that lived off building a mystery that span years, and now it's been canceled. So all that really happened was a bunch of people saw their futures, worried about the implications of their visions for a few months, and then their futures (mostly) came true. In really irritating ways, too. They push the idea that no matter how hard people fight it, they can't avoid their fate. Except when they do. Demetri was supposed to be killed, but he wasn't. Some FBI guy managed to kill himself to prevent a woman from dying, but she gets hit by a car... and the show doesn't bother to say whether she actually dies or not. A guy who saw himself uniting Somalia gets killed.

In terms of people's visions coming true, Mark was drinking in his flash despite being sober... and a few hours before a random guy on the street hands him a flask, which he promptly starts drinking. Good job, dude. It's a miracle how you managed to Die Hard a room full of bad guys while sauced. Olivia and Simon seemed to get closer together for no other reason than their visions said they should. No real romantic chemistry, no real reason for her to cheat on her husband... it was just sort of like, "Well, okay, let's do this. It's our future, right?" If Keiko does end up finding Bryce after all, why doesn't her mom remember being detained in an American airport? Ugh. If all that complaining seemed like a mess, welcome to the experience of watching the show.

Despite a premise that can't actually decide what it's really about and a muddled collection of undirected subplots rather than a direct story arc most of time, the show's biggest problem is that the characters are all terrible. They're not likable, their problems aren't interesting, they do stupid stuff for no reason... it's hard to enjoy a show when you don't have fun watching the people on it. And I'm seriously not exaggerating. Every single character is bad! How does a show get this far with a boring, angsty protagonist surrounded by boring, angsty supporting cast?

I will say, I liked the pilot. Its portrayal of the destruction caused by the whole world blacking out for two minutes was impressive and exciting, and the beginning of the mystery was intriguing. But it was only downhill from there. Without the bad guys having a clear reason for anything they do makes it hard to be interesting in their schemes, and simply too much time is spent on characters whose problems they forgot to make interesting in the context of a world that knows its future. You have a pretty high concept here, do something with it. Instead, it was pretty traditional, uninteresting melodrama. There were a couple episodes and bits I liked, but they were few and far between. There were some particularly bad bits I could pick on, but I don't really feel like it. The show is dead, no reason to keep poking the body.

Batman Begins

I haven't been posting lately, mostly because I've been rewatching some old movies. No reason I can't talk about them, though.

Somewhere in between its release in 2005 and seeing The Dark Knight, I forgot that the first Christopher Nolan-directed Batman movie was as good as it was. I still think Knight's better, but Begins is damn solid in its own right. What's impressive is how he manages to make films that capture the coolness of Batman and comic books in general without having particularly good action scenes. They're a big part of what makes the Spider-Man movies (at least the first two) great, which is the only super hero movie franchise I've enjoyed on the same level as the revived Batman, and usually what carries action movies in general, but they really aren't what makes Batman good. Sure, the fights are there, but they're pretty poorly filmed; lit too dimly, shot too close, and cut too fast. This is partly a stylistic choice to make Batman more secretive and menacing, but it doesn't make for particularly entertaining sequences. Both movies have had decent car chases, but it's really the characters that drive the show, and that's what makes them so much better than the other riffraff.

When Begins came out, origin stories were all the rage, and they still are to some extent, it's just that more properties are already established. A good origin story can be very compelling, the problem is they end up being similar and you can only see a guy accidentally gain powers and adapt to it over the course of an hour so many times before it gets boring. But that's what makes Begins interesting; not only is it a story we haven't heard before, it's one about a character's motives, not the magic MacGuffin that turns him into a freak. (Note: I intentionally misused the movie term "MacGuffin" here, because the next several films I'll be talking about are directed by a man who has no idea what it actually means. Guess who it is!) Showing Bruce Wayne's slow transition into Batman, one he makes because he comes to feel a true need to help people and not because he's strong enough to throw trucks now, is a truly interesting one, and then we get to the second half, which is a pretty darn good crime story besides the somewhat ludicrous doomsday device. The cast is obscenely good, with nearly every significant part played by a well-known talent, and despite the hate she got I think even Katie Holms was competent. Liam Neeson plays a good mentor, but he shows here that he can do other things as well. Besides the fights, the film's only failing in my eyes are the attempts at humor later on, which seem somehow more frequent as the drama builds and usually fall flat. Gordon's racing to get into place with the new Batmobile and stop the bad guys from destroying the whole city, do we really need a cutaway to a random bum telling him he likes his car? In any case, it's not perfect, but it's exactly the reboot Batman needed to fit into this era of a more serious super hero.

The Dark Knight

Batman Begins was one of the better releases in the now quite popular comic book/super hero movement in modern action movies, although it wasn't perfect. The Dark Knight isn't either, of course, but it is probably the best comic book movie I've ever seen. I'd be lying if I said a big part of that wasn't Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker, but the movie wasn't one-note either, as it excelled in most areas. A problem with Begins was the action scenes themselves. The movie completely captured the grittier, darker mood that the Batman franchise took in the 80's, but when people were getting violent it often got confusing because darkness and the trendy shaky camera conspired to muddle what was actually happening. The Dark Knight still isn't perfect, but it's generally easier to see what Batman's doing as he pounds faces in. There are some excellent vehicle sequences as well, which were amplified in intensity by the great and incredibly loud sound design, with my seat in the theater actually rumbling when huge trucks were barreling around. It's not restricted to loud moments - there are plenty of times, usually involving the Joker, where it's impressive how well they got across the characters sickly violent nature without ever breaking the PG-13 rating.

Most of that though is all Ledger - the guy really dove into the character and created one of the most unnerving performances I've ever seen. Every tick, every line shows you the depth of his psychosis. Although I thought it was more impressive, the job he did really shouldn't be compared to Jack Nicholson's in the 1989 film, because they're very different. Nicholson's Joker was perverse and hilarious, Ledger's is just perverse. There are times when he will make you laugh, but that isn't really the goal. I haven't seen any of his other work, but his passing is truly unfortunate. He had quite a talent that we won't have seen enough of. Not that he was the only good member of the cast. Bale's Batman voice is still a little weird, but he does a good job of handling both ends of the character. I haven't seen Eckhart do much serious stuff, but he is great portraying the downfall of Harvey Dent. Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine don't stretch their talents that far but are solid playing familiar characters. I don't like how they had to recast Maggie Gyllenhaal in Katie Holmes' old role, but she probably does a better job than Katie would have. Nolan really impressed me with Memento, and whether he does another Batman or moves on, he's one of the more talented directors working right now. There were some surprises with how he handled all the different characters, but I thought they did a great job keeping everything in check and entertaining.