Blade: Trinity 2004

I’ve been feeling awful all day with an annoying runny nose and sinus headache while running all over town running errands. But I finally get to cap it off with a movie I remembered really enjoying as the last movie in the great Blade Trilogy. As a minor side note, I keep thinking this movie’s subtitle is actually Trilogy instead of Trinity. It wasn’t an awful movie by any means, but there was a lot of stuff in it that I completely didn’t agree with or didn’t make sense that I must have completely overlooked the first time I watched it.

This would have been a good idea in concept, yet it failed in execution.

It starts off with one of the things that I remembered liking the concept of a lot, just like I did in Ghost Rider, the fact that Blade gets in trouble with the FBI. But I didn’t so much like the emphasis on how bad it was that he had killed a human. He killed plenty in the first two movies and he even says that he’s killed 1,130 familiars. None of them were ever a big deal to Whistler. But this leads to an FBI raid of his lair and Whistler sacrifices himself by blowing the place up to get rid of their secrets and evidence. Blade then gives himself up and is taken into custody. But unfortunately, this is where it starts to go wrong for me, because instead of it being an actual police raid, it was actually a setup driven by a large group of vampire familiars. So he gets captured by the vampires, and yet he isn’t immediately killed. Instead he’s played with long enough for a new group of vampire hunters to come in and rescue him.

Slo mo cool walking towards camera shot. Doesn't this look familiar?

So in Blade II, he works with a highly trained group of vampires called the Bloodpack, in this movie he works with a group of moderately trained group of humans and an ex-vampire called the Nightstalkers. It feels like this movie tried to recapture part of the second movie but it only partially succeeded. I’m not going to say anything bad about Ryan Reynolds or Jessica Biel as the two fighting partners of the group. You may love him or hate him, but I’m one of those that enjoyed Reynolds’ multiple quips, and I didn’t have anything against Jessica Biel’s archery loving Whistler’s daughter. She wasn’t anything special, but she wasn’t horrible either. The rest of the Nightstalkers were pretty generic, including the blind scientist with the token child that’s used to try and pull on the audience’s heartstrings but she had so little screentime that I didn’t really care about her one way or the other. She was mainly just used to set up a torture scenario with Ryan Reynolds which I thought was pretty impressive yet they never even start to put it into effect, and it would have made just as much impact if it had been a random little girl.

The main villain in this movie is Dracula who was the first vampire. He is similar to Blade in that he has all of the vampire’s strengths and then some, and none of their weaknesses. He can walk in the sunlight, can shapeshift to some extent, and he likes to be called Drake now. I have no idea if he’s weak to silver or garlic since it never comes up. He’s billed as the supervampire that grew tired of civilization and went to sleep for hundreds of years. Parker Posey and Triple H decide to wake him up to help bring on a new age of vampires… which is never really explained, but I’ll get to that in a moment. He is this all powerful vampire, and yet when he first encounters Blade and his teammates, he doesn’t fight them but instead leads Blade in a chase across the city ending with him stealing a baby from a crib and tossing it across a rooftop before vanishing. Why is he running away? That doesn’t make any sense except for the fact that it would make a 45 minute movie. Aside from that silliness, and the scene where he goes into what is basically a Dracula gift shop, I did generally like him as a character. I just wish he were given stuff to do that made more sense than getting mad at a box of Count Chocula.

Aww, poor Drake, he's mad that Dracula has become a joke in our culture.

This movie felt like it was trying to bring the endgame to this series, but it didn’t know which way to go with it. There’s too many plot threads that aren’t fully fleshed out. There’s a short scene where Blade finds a blood harvesting center. It’s a giant warehouse filled with homeless that were captured and put into a coma to be bled out over a long period of time instead of just being used for a single draining. It feels like it’s going to be set up as the vampire’s endgame, and Blade and Jessica Biel shut it down. And that’s it. There was no set up for it, no call back to it, they didn’t even blow it up, they just turned off the power. And then there’s the endgame on the other side: Daystar. It’s a virus that targets vampires, kills them almost instantly, and spreads quickly through the air. But of course they need Drake’s blood for it to work all the way. But at the end of the movie, it appears that it just kills all the vampires in the building and there isn’t any mention of it spreading across the world.

In the end, this movie felt like it was all style over substance. The special effects and fight scenes were excellent, but the plot and characters suffered for it. Thankfully there wasn’t any love story shoehorned onto Blade this time, but there wasn’t really much else for him to do beside fight vampires and cops. There were a lot of callbacks to the two previous movies, like the splitting jaw from Blade II used on the dogs and in Dracula’s final form. While I did personally like the dogs, did they learn nothing from how people reacted towards the mutant poodle in Hulk the year before? At least this movie used them briefly and generally for comic relief. There was also the callback to the first Blade movie where Whistler talked about his family to Blade, and then they added a line at the end so that it connects to his daughter. Whatever. Like I said at the beginning, I came into this movie hoping for a good time, and when it was time for action I wasn’t disappointed, but when the plot started coming up, my hopes for the movie were let down. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights, and remember, if you like what you’re reading, share it on Twitter, on Facebook, or wherever else so more people can come on by.