David Goyer, writer of the first two films in the Blade series, has some sick ideas now that he’s back at the helm of the movie series he created with Blade: Trinity. Characters receive arrows in the eye, little girls are placed in peril and in one sequence, a blind girl is stalked and savagely murdered. It’s too bad Goyer knows very little about storytelling because this time, his sloppy framework for the screenplay is emphasized by his shoddy direction and visual storytelling.
The vampire enemies this time are led by Danica Talos (Parker Posey, Best in Show), the figurehead for a massive, high-reaching vampire conspiracy dedicated to creating a series of blood farms to harvest feeble humans’ life force. To carry out this somewhat familiar plan (The Matrix comes to mind), Blade needs to be wiped out, so the vampires head out to recruit the original gangsta: Dracula. Nevermind that it only takes a little digging by hand to uncover this creature from a centuries-long slumber (in Iraq, no less), he seems to be aware of Bram Stoker’s novel even though he was buried long before it was written and, oh, yeah, he speaks ENGLISH.
Blade eventually finds himself saved by an insufferable duo, the oddly named Hannibal King (Ryan Reynolds, Van Wilder) and Whistler’s daughter, Abigail (Jessica Biel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), known together as the Nightstalkers. It’s fairly obvious the filmmakers are more smitten with this duo than they are with Blade, because they get the majority of the screen time. It’s too bad the two are as vital to the pulse of the Blade series as Scrappy in Scooby-Doo. Reynolds is flippant and irritating in his role as the foul-mouthed King, with nearly all of his lines being punchlines that deflate necessary tension. Meanwhile, Biel is yet another hot female action automaton with no personality; her distinguishing features being her midriff, signature use of the bow and arrow and her gregarious product-placement usage of an iPod she listens to while fighting. I doubt someone could properly react in combat with bloodsuckers as Jurassic 5 blasts in his or her eardrums, but then again, I don’t fight vampires.
What the Blade movies usually have going for them is wanton violence, and Trinity fits in admirably in this aspect. Fans looking for a number of over-the-top vampire deaths can look no further, as the action here is reliably incoherent and headache inducing. The weapons have also increased in ridiculousness from the first two films – they are viewed by the camera with a pornographic eye, meant to please an audience of 13-year-olds and Charlton Heston.
For the record, Snipes is sharp, and his performance is reliably angry, irritated and tough. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see audiences demand another go-round for Snipes as the character in the future, even though the story relies too much on the Nightstalkers. But this doesn’t make up for the ridiculous Trinity, which brings nothing new to the movie vampire myths. While the original Blade had style and Blade II managed to establish a suffocating atmosphere of dread, Trinity only adds a feeble, prissy Dracula and two grating sidekicks.
