I remember clearly renting and watching the first Blade movie. It was a total shock to me to really enjoy the heck out of it. For some reason instinct told me that it would be a complete loser and nothing but my own perverse affection for bad flicks was making me watch it. Hopes were much higher for Blade 2, simply because it was being directed by Guillermo del Toro, who had wowed me the year before with The Devil’s Backbone. That movie met my expectations. The third movie was to be directed by David Goyer, who had scripted the first two movies. His presence would seem to indicate that the movie would work, although perhaps not with as much visual flair with a rookie director. One for three isn’t much of a batting average for me.
Goyer takes a hard right turn with the series by killing off a major character, adding two new characters and trying to inject some humor into the proceedings. This was not a good idea. A little humor is fine but Blade is a humorless sort of hero. He is devoted to his task of ridding the world of vampires to the exclusion of anything else. Jokes are pretty much alien to him. There is a bit of fun to be had watching Ryan Reynolds crack jokes at his expense but it wears thin fairly quickly. Wesley Snipes can be a very funny guy when the role calls for it. This just wasn’t it.
The addition of Ryan Reynolds, paradoxically, is the best thing about this movie. While his wise cracking vampire hunter character Hannibal King provides the one thing the series didn’t need, Reynolds is too good at it to be annoyed with him. If I’m casting a movie and I need a wise cracking character, Reynolds would be the first guy I’d call. Simple as that. Hell I used to sit through the otherwise awful series Two Guys and a Girl, just because Reynolds was in it. I liked Reynolds’ work in this movie, it just happened to be in the wrong movie.
The other major addition is Jessica Biel as Abigail Whistler, the daughter of recently subtracted character Whistler (Kris Kristofferson). Ms. Biel is as stunning as ever but her character is poorly conceived. A warrior who fights with an iPod blaring in the ears all the time? Are you fucking kidding me? No fighter worth anything would close off as important a sense as their hearing and still go into battle. It’s just idiotic, only slightly less than if she deliberately strapped on a blindfold before getting into a fight. I like to listen to music while I work, but if my work involved being able to hear if someone was going to attack me from behind, I think I’d go without.
The story is about yet another plot by the bloodsuckers to take over the world. Since they can’t beat Blade, they decide to awaken the big guy himself. Dracula. Or as they call him here, Drake. Anyway, Drake is a shape shifting Euro-trash looking vampire. Easily the worst conceived monster since that painfully bad human/xenomorph hybrid in Alien Resurrection. This is a vampire strong enough to walk in daylight and mimic anybody, as well as turn into a critter with a jaw hinged in about sixteen different places, and yet he still settles for a sword fight with Blade. This kind of thinking could set the vampire genre back at least a decade.
Extras on the disc? I half-listened to the commentary track with Goyer, Reynolds and Biel for about half an hour before I ran out of patience for the movie. There might be other stuff but Netflix only sent me disc one and I’m just not interested enough to waste a slot on disc 2. In fact, I’m not interested enough to type another word of this review.
- This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it is too bored to think of anything clever to write here.
