I have been gone for too long, my friends. But I return bearing gifts!
I have a crappy new icon, a bit belated, and not so full of Christmas cheer, which adequately expresses my opinion of the crunching holiday season. It also serves to remind me how much better Underworld was than Blade: Trinity. Which is saying something.
Yes, O my Legion of Doom, I did get to the movies on Friday, and Sargon even felt up to coming, so all was well in the realm of marital bliss.
Be warned: this review is far, far longer than the movie deserves, but here it is nevertheless. And there are spoilers, for those of you who honestly think that you can spoil such a movie.
Once more I whipped out the notebook and ballpoint of pain. I felt trepidation as I sat in the darkening theater for the last matinee showing of Blade: Trinity. Was my pen mightier than the sword of the Daywalker? We shall soon see.
After being subjected to eight previews full of Ugly-Ass White Guys™ and Intimidating Typecast Black Men™, our movie finally opens.
The first shot is a rippling sea of blood, like one of those pornographic chocolate commercials where a firm and rigid candy bar plunges into the molten furnace of fondue, and then every woman in the living room moans in misplaced sexual ecstasy. I kept hearing the Nestlé song from the 80's, you know, the one from the commercial with the woman in white fur, who turned into a fox? The song that sounded like Tangerine Dream kidnapped Vanessa Williams. That was a cool commercial. But I digress.
We open in the Syrian desert, under a broiling sun, where a whole platoon of ugly-ass vampires have decided to raid some pretty cool-looking ruins. Why they aren't doing this at night is a mystery explicable only by the laws of movie physics. The same celestial anomalies that allows there to be three full moons in Van Helsing and insist that there is no polar cap or snow in the southern hemisphere as shown in The Day After Tomorrow dictate that it is always sunny over the desert. Apparently, the world is flat as a tabletop, and the dangling light bulb of the sun swings directly over the desert.
When I say these vampires are ugly, I mean they make the ugly vampires in the first two movies look like extras from the Rivendell scenes in Lord of the Rings. I'm all for variety in casting, but if I were immortal and looking to create more of my own unholy kind, I would damn sure hold out for a real looker and not just sink my overbite into the first piece of Eurotrash that blew my way.
They are led by Vampire Skank, played by Parker Posey, who looks like a homeless crack whore dressed in Joan Crawford's thrift-store rejects. And that's being nice.
Anyway, in this scene we learn that Dracula has a strobelight. It's pretty cool. Even Dracula is pretty cool at this point, since we haven't seen his face. He even beheads one of the ugly-ass vampires, which made me want to like him, even though things didn't end up working out between us.
After establishing our villains, such as they are, we have a voiceover straight out of Mallrats, and the less said about that the better. Fortunately, it ends in favor of an orgy of exploding buildings and ass-kickery.
Now we are reintroduced to our hero, who has undergone superhero sequel evolution, becoming even more improbably cool. It has now passed the point of ridiculousness. I could no more suspend my disbelief than I could hoist a seventy-pound roadkill doberman with a fishing line.
Blade's black coat now has a red lining, and he has become so bad-ass that the soundtrack makes puma noises whenever he does anything really cool. He also has contacts, which are very distracting. This is probably to throw off his enemies. "Hey! It's Blade! I'm going to kill - Dude, what the fuck is up with your eyes?" But this isn't true, because he still wears his sunglasses all the time. Maybe they're prescription or something.
Oh, yeah. It may have been the crack I was smoking, but I think he even had a knife on a string.
By the time we get back to Vampire Skank and her clique of undead losers, I am snickering. We are asked to believe that these individuals pose a threat not just to humanity, but to Blade himself. When your team of crack vampire commandos includes noted wrestler Preparation H, and he is one of the better performers, I think you need a better HR director. Surely you have one, Vampire Skank, somewhere in that huge building?
Wait. That's the casting director's fault. My bad.
Dracula does not help things. First he looks like the Predator crossed with the red wolf armor from Bram Stoker's Dracula, with a little Giger stirred in, then he looks like . . . well . . . I have tried several ways of describing it, but I'll leave it to you to decide which you think is most accurate.
Dracula as a human looks:
1) Like a Mexican wrestler humped a soccer hooligan.
2) Like the unholy, buzz-cutted breeding of a Turkish pop singer with a porn star - probably Ron Jeremy.
3) Like Strongbad would look without his helmet.
I was so upset by his appearance that I found myself siding with the good guys against the Dark Master.
Once more, the Dracula from Buffy manages to make this one look silly. And that's saying a lot. They even call him "Drake," apparently to divorce him from the literary or historical Dracula. It's almost as though they know that he sucks.
And, God, the Vampire Skank . . . ugh! I like Parker Posey, despite her inverted mouth and backwards name, but her part was just unwatchable. I didn't even love to hate her, I just wanted to slap her with a bloody rat until she ran off the screen.
There is, in fact, a sad dearth of likeable characters in this movie. There is no Deacon, no Quinn, no Ron Perlman in sunglasses, to alleviate our apathy.
Whistler is the coolest character in the series, but the appearance of his extremely hot, extremely cool daughter spells certain doom for the crotchety old man. One cannot have two incredibly cool Whistlers in the same franchise. One of them has to go.
And from the moment Jessica Biel throws off her housefrau disguise and commences applying foot to undead ass, we know which one that is going to be.
It's probably just as well, because Jessica's appeal is all physical, and it's hard to ruin a body like that even with the shittiest editing and directing on earth. Whistler's appeal is all in his delivery, his attitude. This movie's sound, editing, and direction managed to ruin what lines Whistler has. In the first movie he convincingly delivered some of the most difficult expository dialogue I've ever heard without offending my ears. Here, the director apparently just used the first take of everything, whether it sucked or not.
As for Blade, poor Wesley's acting made me wonder if he was even there most of the time.
Look, Blade's meditating. No. Wait. He's asleep. No, he's just brooding. Shit. What is he doing?
Answer: boring the shit out of us until the FBI bad guys crash his "So Sorry For Myself" party.
After realizing the audience doesn't care, Whistler kills himself in a desperate attempt to hold the audience's attention. His ploy, however, is in vain. It only accelerates our plunge into utter cinematic apathy. It is a measure of the director's failure that, on Whistler's death, I only felt relief that he would now be free of the pain that was this movie.
Once Whistler departs the scene, our only question is how long we will have to wait until Jessica Biel gets naked, which she does later, in a blood-smeared shower sequence that pushes buttons I'd rather you didn't know I have.
First, though, Blade has to get caught.
Now, this is a personal thing, but why does every single vampire, ever do that stupid cat-hiss/snarl thing? Even Blade himself did it in this movie, once he's surrounded by bad guys whose asses he inexplicably feels he cannot kick. Perhaps because he's feeling kind of punky after losing his hetero man-partner. He hisses and hunches like a cat being stuffed into the carrier to go to the vet, and to the vet he goes.
We are subjected to a terribly acted interrogation/psychoanalysis scene, where the chief point of interest is Blade's tight red shirt. The room must have been cold, because the Daywalker's nipples were sticking right out. They should have given him some electrical tape or something, because it was disturbing.
After a mandatory setup line, Snarky Guy breaks in and rescues Blade with the help of Whistlerette, and some smack gets laid down.
Here's where it gets good. Once again, we see Preparation H, who has obviously watched Underworld. He chases after the car, trying to catch it. Now, this worked for Lucian in Underworld, but three things should be pointed out:
1) Lucian was really fucking cool, not an ambulatory chunk of assmeat.
2) There were only two people in the car in Underworld. One was a Hapless Victim™ and the other, while certifiably badass, was driving.
3) You should never chase a car when there is an archer in the backseat.
As Strongbad (or Dracula) would say: Arrowed!
Then we have the obligatory expository scene, that goes something like this:
Snarky Guy: "Welcome to the Honeycomb Hideout. We got all our equipment out of 80's cereal boxes."
Blade: Broods
Snarky Guy: "I'm the comic relief. One time, my cousin got this cat stuck up his ass . . ."
Blade: "Wrong movie, wrong actor, asshole."
Snarky Guy: "Hey, work with me here. These guys are . . . umm . . . well, they're guys whose names I can't remember. They, umm . . . they . . . what do you guys do again?"
Guys: "We're expendable."
Snarky Guy: "Right. And here's the genius, who is ironically blind, and here is her creepy, staring kid. Oh, yeah. And Whistlerette."
Whistlerette: "Hi. I'm hot."
Blade: "I see you have an iPod. Nice product placement."
Whistlerette: "Thanks."
Snarky Guy: "And here's Patton Oswalt, who is in charge of our weapons. He eats all the cereal."
Patton Oswalt: "I got Whistlerette's ultraviolet cheese-cutter from a box of Sugar-Frosted Spoor. Isn't it cool?"
Snarky Guy: "Ha, ha. He's always cutting the cheese. Patton here only has about four lines, but he delivers them with more aplomb than anyone else in this entire movie. But we try so hard you're obligated to like us. We're lovable misfits, dammit!"
Blade: "That does not make us a team."
Snarky Guy: "Come on, Meanypants! I know what I'm doing. I even used to be a familiar. Check out my pubes!"
Blade: "Oh, fuck. Get me out of here."
But there is no going back, for him or us.
It gets worse: a lip-twitching hissyfit thrown by Vampire Skank reminds us just how cool Deacon Frost was as an Evil Overlord. In fact, Craven from Underworld, with his bullfighter fashion sense and his grating and indeterminately Euro-accented tenor, looks like a veritable Darth Vader in comparison.
About the time Preparation H snarls "We got assraped!" the audience is feeling much the same way.
And then there's more Dracula, wandering around in an open shirt like a relentlessly hetero man-child attacked by vengeful fashion designers bent on trying, without success, to make him appear sexy and bicurious. Because we all know from reading Anne Rice that vampires have to be bisexual. Or at least be snappy dressers.
He wears his regulation-issue leather pants the way a hamster would wear fruit roll-ups.
I'm not sure what I meant by that. It's in my notes. I think I meant it looked out of place. Not that he appears to be trying to eat them.
Now, some Elasmobranchii had been ramped at this point, but the sequence that really jumped the shark was the ass-kicking montage that degenerated into a video-game style buttcircus of screen-wipes, intercuts, and split-screens that gave me panic-attack-inducing flashbacks to The Hulk, which is not something any sentient being should have to endure.
As
spacezombie can attest, I collapsed into helpless giggles at this point and almost couldn't go on.
I stayed only for Jessica Biel, who does have the most incredible body in the movie. Her deltoids have identifiable striations in them. I can't tell if I want her to kick my ass, or do something else to it. And I doubt I'd feel differently if I were a guy. She could take you out just by glaring at you and doing that scary-girl walk. By the time Snarky Guy is captured, she is definitely the scariest person in the movie.
The fact that we aren't scared of the villain is only made worse by a stupid chase scene in which Dracula runs from Blade for no discernible reason except that the writer felt it was about time for a "Save My Fucking Baby" scene. (Good luck, Lady. I liked the vampire Pomeranian way, way better.) Worse, Dracula immediately follows this annoying cliché with a version of the "Look at the Pathetic Humans" speech, mirroring the Deacon/Blade scene from the first movie almost exactly, only without the virtue of a cute yet scenery-chewing villain.
It says a lot about talent that Deacon Frost actually managed to be scary in spite of looking like an underfed college student. Dracula? It would take more acting than this guy had to make me scared of a guy who has that same slightly bulgy, thick-fleshed look that I associate with neutered dogs. They would have been better off casting The Rock. And I mean that.
The torture of Snarky Guy provides the only remaning high point in the movie. I was laughing so hard at the dialogue that I forgot to be scared for him. Yes, I am in full agreement with everyone else: this movie gets an extra point for the phrase "cockjuggling thundercunt."
Vampire Skank threatens Snarky Guy with turning him and making him eat the creepy little girl, which is an admittedly horrific idea, but what comes of it? Absolutely Nothing! I swear Vampire Skank had lipstick on her teeth at one point.
Then Dracula puts the moves on the little girl, which is just disturbing. He, like a steroid-inflated Peter Pan, delivers the "you could be a child forever" line with creepy intensity. Jesus! Why is he chatting her up? Does he really feel like he needs to turn a little girl to swell his Legion of Doom?
Given the quality of his legion so far, yes, probably so.
Are you beginning to sense that there was not all that much to like about this movie? Good.
By the time Dracula gets around to fighting Blade, we are not at all surprised to see him show up in a leather corset with 1/5 of a suit of armor stolen from The 13th Warrior. In fact, we expect it. It is still appalling. Not since the final fight sequence of Brotherhood of the Wolf has male villain fashion been so brutally raped.
And yet, it is more appalling still when Dracula just rips it all off. No, really, Movie. We don't want to see him naked. It's like watching a man have sex with a horse - sick fascination, only without the fascination part.
Yes, I loathed him just that much.
The final fight had some cool moments, but since we were never really scared of Dracula, we aren't really afraid Blade will lose. And he doesn't.
I'm sure I, like, ruined that for you.
I'm a big fan of the first two Blade movies, and I'm not upset that I saw this one in the theater. I liked it, actually, but it doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. Or even distant scrutiny through the wrong end of some foggy opera glasses.
Overall, the plot was as riddled with holes as Sonny Corleone's corpse, which is a comparison by far too good for this movie. The good points can be summed up on two fingers: Jessica Biel, who should be cast as Abbey Chase of the Danger Girl comics right now, and Ryan Reynolds, who was funny, even if he was in the wrong movie. Get thee to a Joss Whedon script!
It's your guess, by the way, which two fingers I am holding up.
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