The problem with Blade: Trinity is that it is half Blade and half Poochie. I’ll be up front. I fucking love the first two Blade movies because even though they were ostensibly made for little kids, they are in actuality as violent as anything out there. Sure, the violence has gotten more and more cartoony, but even this film opens up with a decapitation! Also, Snipe’s portrayal of the “Daywalker” Blade is excellent as always (Blade the dude, based on a comic book, is some sort of conflicted Vampire hybrid. Much like a Toyota Prius, except with blood lust. He is not effected by sunlight or garlic, but still needs to eat blood. I forget why, but his only purpose in life is to kill other vampires. And he’s black. And not Will Smith black, either; Blade is Wesley Snipes black). Really, like Connery and James Bond, Snipes has been seemingly genetically engineered to play Blade. I never want to see him do anything else. No, really. Nothing else. Well… unless he does a sequel to One Night Stand, but only because I want to hear Ming-Na exhort him to do “circles” again
Seriously, though, the Poochie-ness of the film was hard for me to stomach most of the time. Like, in the opening chase/butchering sequence, Blade is kicking all these dude’s Vampire asses. Pretty good stuff. He’s got this new weapon that is basically a silver-knife on a string and he kills like six people with it before he has to pull out his machine guns (which look like hand guns) and kill six or twelve more dudes. Love it. Do I care that he does a standing leap into a backwards flip–with the guns drawn–to avoid getting run over by a car and then lands and kills two more guys? Nope. Love the killing. But then, in what is unfortunately an homage to the vile XXX, Blade chases the bad guys down in his roided-up muscle car, a ’71 Dodge Charger. Now, anybody who knows ANYTHING about cars knows that an American muscle car from the 70s is the last vehicle you would ever want in a chase. Sure, they are fast, but they cannot turn left or right. Blade would have been much better off in a Mazda 3 wagon, cause at least the Mazda can move laterally at speed. He had the Dodge simply because it looked “cool,” not because it looked cool and made sense. Looking cool for the sake of looking cool is dumb, pointless and to me, aggravating. Besides, Blade would drive a black BMW 6 series or that new Bentley coupe.
Blade: Trinity also featured a real life talking Poochie. Ryan Reynolds plays the reprehensibly named Hannibal King. Exactly what basement comic book dude/writer/director David Goyer crawled out of I don’t ever want to know, but man… What a stupid name! “Scary Cool Guy” was taken? I fucking hate nerds. Especially rich nerds who wear leather. Hannibal King is part of the “Trinity,” along with Blade and Abigail, Whistler’s daughter. They all hate and kill Vampire’s for a living. Poochie, I mean Hannibal King, used to be a vampire, but Whistler cured him (like he cured Blade, I think… I don’t really remember, nor could anything matter less). I should stop and mention that killing off Kristofferson’s excellent misanthropic, curmudgeon character Whistler early into the third installment of the franchise did nothing to help the movie in anyway. Kris was actually the most enjoyable part of the second film. Dumb, dumb mistake. Especially since both Blade and Abigail aren’t even that upset about it. Like, they don’t avenge him or anything. By the way, props to Ryan Reynolds for saying, “My name is Hannibal King” and not doubling over in hysterics. It’s hard; try it. Now look, you can do a wisecracking Vampire killer pretty well. See Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing in Coppola’s Dracula or James Woods as Jack Crow in John Carpenter’s Vampires. But Reynolds, unlike the aforementioned dudes, never takes anything seriously. He’s just straight goofy and flip the whole way through. Which, like, built no dramatic tension and when he got kidnapped by Dracula (wait for it) I just didn’t even care. In fact, if Hannibal King had been killed by Dracula instead of abducted, the move could have had the exact same ending. And why does Dracula kidnap three people during the course of the film?
More Poochie. So, like, one of the most enjoyable things about Blade the character is how motherfucking laconic he is. Like, the bad guy could be all, “Well Blade, as soon as we get done torturing your best friend to death, then we will execute our evil plan, enslaving all humans, except for the ones that we kill–for fun! And then we’ll starve you and force you to eat your way out of a school bus! What do you think of that, Blade?” And Blade would just answer, “I’m going to kill all of you motherfuckers.” And then, he would actually kill like fifty vampires in thirty-seven seconds. But, in the Poochie-fied Trinity, Hannibal King is verbal diarrhea boy. He just doesn’t shut up. Like, Dracula stabs him in the shoulder (don’t worry about it) and when Abigail is pulling the blade out, he just can’t resist telling a lesbian vampire joke. A LAME lesbian vampire joke, I should add. Everything is totally on the nose with him. Particularly hateful is when he explains to Blade that Abigail likes to make “trance-hop” play lists on iTunes for her iPod before she kicks major vampire-booty (I should mention that I just made that last sentence up, but I would wager that it is pretty close to the script). Like, he couldn’t just say, “she enjoys listening to music.” But, shitty dialogue is sort of this film’s hallmark. Still though, the fact that Hannibal King (and to a lesser extent Abigail) is so ridiculous is not lost on Blade who chews King out for looking like a clown and pretending to play stalker (stalker means “Vampire hunter,” apparently). Oh, I should mention that Hannibal King calls he and Abigail’s stalker cell, “The Night Stalkers.” No, really. I guess the BTK Gang was taken, as was Little Bundys. What was really funny though, and very reminiscent of when Bart asked Homer if he even works any more and Homer answers, “I think it’s obvious that I don’t,” was when Blade asks Hannibal King how they finance their little operation, to which Hannibal King answers, “Come on.”
OK, so Dracula is in the movie. Only instead of being a suave Transylvanian forsaken by God, he looks like somebody Schwarzenegger would have had to dispense with before getting to the real bad guy circa 1986. Going with a muscle-bound dimwitted Dracula was a giant mistake; one that director-boy seemed to realize halfway through the movie. So, Dracula is given some lines… which are bloody fucking terrible! At one point he is telling Parker Posey (she’s bad guy number two, and besides Snipes, the best thing about the movie) to take the cross of her neck. Why a vampire can wear a cross is never explained (if it is, I either missed it or just don’t care), but Dracula starts explaining how he was there when Jesus was crucified. For the briefest moment I’m thinking to myself, “this could be good,” (need to point out that in Blade Trinity Dracula is 9,000 years old and a different species, sleeps in a Syrian pyramid, etc.) because having an eyewitness to the supposed Crucifixion is a pretty cool story device. Of course, Dracula goes on to say, “He died for the sins of humans, not mine.” LAME. Beside propagating the lies that A) Christ existed and B) Christ was divine, it is just such a dumb-fucking thing to say! And what the hell does it mean? Even more stupefying is later when he is telling a seven-year-old girl (why is Dracula talking to and not feasting on seven-year-olds? I don’t know) that there is no God–which kills his earlier point about Christ dying for our collective sins–the seven-year-old gets in a better line. (A line that was straight-up lifted from Commando “Not as nice as watching him smash your face in.”) I mean… if Dracula can verbally get his own ass handed to him by a seven-year-old, why the fuck should I, as the viewer, be intimidated by him? I never was for a second, especially when he takes off his shirt to reveal his sexy abs, but I’m just asking. I mean, if you’re going to steal from Commando, at least put the bad guy in a chain mail vest!
Tons more stupid, somewhat Poochie-style shit abounds. In the traditional good-guys-putting-on-tons-of-weapons-before-killing-tons-of-bad-guys scene that was perfected by Stallone in Rambo, the director goes way out of his way to show Abigail putting in her iPod ear buds. As if listening to Staind is somehow as important as her knife-shoe or her ultraviolet bow. Oh… yeah, so she has this ultraviolet bow… Um… Jeus… The Blade franchise usually features cool weapons, or at least interesting ones. Abigail’s UV bow looks like a black light fucked a crossbow. It is really lame. Also, making his big screen debut, Triple H is particularly bad. He’s sort of even more Poochie than the Poochie guy. Like, the very first shot in the film is Triple H flipping off a helicopter–for no reason. He was wearing a mask, so I can’t be certain, but… oh fuck it, I’m certain. So, yeah, basically, with the exception of Snipes and Posey, all the other people in Blade: Trinity were awful. Er, I guess Jessica Biel is fine as the daughter of Whistler, but as easy on the eyes as she was, I would take Kristofferson in a heartbeat. I mean, stand those two next to each other and ask ANBODY who they would rather watch for ninety-minutes killing vampires and only those who live in Mom’s basement would answer, “Biel!” Seriously, give me a limping, snarling, mangled old crustacean of a son-of-a bitch with a shotgun anytime rather than some mildly attractive bulimic that acts tough through silence and frowning. If I wanted to see boobies, I’d watch porn. I mean when I want to see boobies, I watch porn. When I want to see 300+ vampires get viciously slaughtered assembly-line style by a sword wielding undead black man, I watch Blade and Blade II.
Special Ruthless Reviews:
- Major Oversight: Blade: Poochie featured not one, but three vampire dogs. That’s fucking great! Any kind of zombie or undead animal is beautiful to me. Like the Zombie Parrot and Monkey in Pirates of the Caribbean. And yes, one of the dogs was a “fucking pomeranian.” With papers.