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.