Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Greg reviewed the 2002 Guillermo del Toro film Blade II. Today, Bernhardt looks at the 2004 David S. Goyer film, Blade: Trinity. This article will contain spoilers.
This one’s a rougher ride than its predecessor.
Much like Wesley Snipes himself, by the time Blade: Trinity rolls around in this trilogy I am checked all the way out. It was true back when I first watched these movies; it’s true today. This film was locked in before the second movie was even released, with David S. Goyer signed to write and produce it; he’d end up directing it as well when a succession of directors turned down the job. A funny bit of trivia: One of those directors was Oliver Hirschbiegel, who declined the project in order to direct the last-days-of-Hitler bunker drama “Downfall,” famous to anyone who was on the internet from 2008 to 2015 for one specific scene of Hitler screaming at his generals that got meme-rebranded whenever e.g. the Dallas Cowboys went 8-8.
Goyer’s last outing as a writer for this series was bad; this one is worse, except in one specific regard — the “motherfuckers” are better. There are two, one of which is delivered to the evil top cop out at the body farm at the end of act two and the other of which happens just before the fight with Dracula. Neither of them are iconic; the first one is better, and it’s your classic, “But they’ll kill me!” “Motherfucker, I’ll kill you!” with some good mustard on it from Snipes, but it clears the bar set by Blade II. The rest of the writing, though, melds the worst tendencies of mediocre comic book writers — there’s a brutal scene early on during the fifteen minutes Kris Kristofferson is actually in this film where Blade and Whistler just look each other in the eye standing seven feet apart and directly exposit their found family relationship to each other for ninety seconds, so that you get the cliff notes of the previous two movies before the cops anticlimactically kill Whistler off for good — with the worst tendencies of anyone scripting a Ryan Reynolds movie at any point in his career. The jokes are bad, man. They’re foul. I am not what you would call a Ryan Reynolds fan on his best days, but he didn’t write these lines himself and Goyer is not a funny man.
The cast is…the cast is very 2004. Snipes, of course, is the most checked-out he’s ever been; the famous, semi-apocryphal story about them having to CGI eyes onto him because he wouldn’t open them for a scene has some caveats to it — the scene in question is the movie’s alternate ending for the unrated cut, where “Blade” (who is the bad guy in disguise as Blade’s corpse) gets up off the table and starts wrecking people. In the original version of the scene he stays dead on the morgue slab; it appears they just CGI’d the eyes onto footage from that version of the scene instead of getting Snipes back after the end of principal photography to refilm the shot for this alternate ending, since the rest of the action is shot from behind with a body double. Goyer basically says this in the DVD commentary that’s the genesis of this rumor, but in a very weird and uncharitable way that implies Snipes is both lazy and insane, possibly because he and Snipes routinely got into screaming matches on set that found their own genesis in Snipes calling him a racist. Interesting! However it’s still incredibly obvious that Snipes is putting forth the minimum viable effort in this movie. Blade’s participation in the vast majority of the fights he’s in across the movie’s runtime is limited to him standing in place shooting guns, or walking at normal pace down a hallway shooting guns (and occasionally doing a single move to a guy who runs up to him), or Snipes being replaced by a stuntman or CGI body double to do a big jump a hundred feet or more away from the camera. In the traditional opening “Blade kills a bunch of level 1 vampires” fight scene, they even replace his silver knives from the first two films with a CGI knife whip that he can swing around without having to do any real choreography. Honestly, it’s pretty cool and I’m sad that’s the only scene it’s in.
Trinity is Dominic Purcell’s first real breakout role; you know him from Prison Break and the DC Comics “Arrowverse” shows on the CW and a whole lot of other stuff now, but back then, he was just the lead actor from baffling cop procedural/X-Files mashup John Doe, which ran a season and then was cancelled. He plays the antagonist here, and the first sign of trouble comes when the film doesn’t have the confidence to straight-up call him Dracula, because that’s not cool in 2004, and instead goes with, “well he’s been known as many things throughout the ages, like Dracula or Dagon, but now he’s called…Drake.” Right. Drake. The modern conceptions of Dracula are too nerdy and weak and lame — we get a whole scene about this, where he murders the goth kids working at a very confusing Vampire Paraphernalia Store somewhere in Brooklyn — and so this ripped hunk has to go by a modern badass name, Drake. In fairness, it was 2004, so they didn’t know. Purcell is fine, if ridiculous and replacement level. It might just be his later roles coloring my perception, but he’s impossible to take seriously as an ultimate big bad.
Jessica Biel is Whistler’s illegitimate daughter Abigail, who is mostly remembered as a character for the incredibly goofy “oh yeah she listens to her iPod during fight scenes, she’s making her playlist right now” product placement (that apparently Apple didn’t even pay for!); Biel turns in the best performance of the leads basically by being a generally competent performer who does her job. Ryan Reynolds is not fully the caricature of himself that he’ll become by the time Deadpool rolls around, which is to say that he’s still capable of delivering a serious line-read when expressly ordered to do so, but he’s a terrible narrator and a comically bad choice to torch-pass the franchise to (luckily for everyone involved, the Nightstalkers spin-off movie that this film is the stealth pilot for never comes to pass). The experience of Reynolds is made worse by the film slotting then-WWE wrestler, current WWE booker Triple H/Paul Levesque (henceforth Triple Paul) and Parker Posey in as his antagonists. If you don’t remember Triple Paul’s film career, there’s a reason for that; he significantly underperforms even as a dumb malevolent galoot here. This is a role that, say, Dave Bautista would have excelled at even though he would have correctly seen it as dues-paying comedy jobber work that was beneath him. Triple Paul isn’t Dave Bautista, and though Goyer’s Jarko Grimwood doesn’t give him near as much to work with as James Gunn’s Drax the Destroyer gave Big Dave, there’s a dumb, flat, sparkless-behind-the-eyes oafishness to his Jarko that never really gets him over as a credible threat. Parker Posey is usually a delight, but a combination of bad script, bad direction, poor choice of co-workers, and if we’re being honest a phoned-in performance lead to her Danica Talos character falling flat. To be fair, most performers would find it difficult to sell true dangerous sexual malevolence when the script has Ryan Reynolds hanging around constantly making jokes about how her fangs are in her vagina (this gets repeated often enough it’s unclear whether it is in fact a joke), and once the character reaches the “she keeps a vampire Pomeranian around for comedy bits” tier of schlock it makes sense to just turn into the skid and collect your paycheck after the crash.
There’s some good stuff at the edges. Natasha Lyonne is basically unrecognizable in this as the blind scientist Sommerfield who gets carved up at the end of act two; she’s pretty good as far as doomed mom characters go. The star of the show is John Michael Higgins (Arrested Development’s Wayne Jarvis himself!) as the celebrity parapsychologist, police profiler, and vampire expert Dr. Edgar Vance, who of course secretly works for the draculas. He gets one big scene in the police station early on and then dies off camera to set up an infinitely less interesting action chase with Drake. Eric Bogosian is in here for a hot second in the opening scene as a drivetime radio host talking to Vance and the similarly compromised NYPD chief of police. There’s also bad stuff at the edges; Patton Oswalt is the gadget guy for this film and he is absolutely insufferable in his like three minutes of runtime. At least some of it’s the script, but I’m sure he got his own special sauce in there too on the jokes, which are all atrocious. Sub-Reynolds behavior
The plot’s mostly irrelevant. It’s a Blade vs. Dracula movie but they screw it up by also making it a stealth Nightstalkers franchise launch. Much like the last movie, too much time is spent both putting together and dismantling a team. This is just not a good version of the Blade character to be asking to play nice with so many irritating pretty young things; Blade II had the right idea by having them as allies of convenience only. We get our one actual for-real fight scene of the film at the very end with Purcell and Snipes, and it kind of rises to the occasion, but it has the same problem all the fight scenes in Blade II and Trinity have: They only look crisp if you run them at 1.2x speed playback. There’s some stuff in here about a vampire-killing virus that is mostly a macguffin to wrap up the plot when it’s time to hit their outs. One of the worst Draculas (proper noun, the actual guy himself) we’ve seen yet in this feature; incredibly thinly sketched to the point where his only two character traits are 1) he talks constantly about the nobility and honor of being a vampire, a superior type of creature and 2) he loves to steal children as hostages. Is there supposed to be a juxtaposition here? It’s not highlighted, and “Drake’s” final act in the film is to nobly change his corpse into a lookalike for Blade’s to help him escape an FBI manhunt, which is also something he apparently knows and cares about. Frankly, not too broken up that the franchise stopped here.
Rob tried to get me to watch Deadpool & Wolverine for the Blade scene but I am pleased to report that all I did was skim the press for it, where it sounds like Snipes and Reynolds are cool now. I’m very happy for them. I’m sure the forty-five seconds or whatever that Blade is in that movie are fun for those that partook.
In retaliation, Rob then assigned me to watch Morbius next week instead. So we’ll be doing that. See you then, Morbheads.
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