Dead and Buried
Hunting season is over in Blade Trinity. (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: It makes you think, "If it has Parker Posey in it it's got to be good."
The Downside: You'd be wrong.
Writers, and those poor slobs who write "How to Write a Blockbuster/Bestseller" books, often talk about something called "suspension of disbelief." Essentially, this is a state of mind that used car salesmen have wet dreams about, seeing that it puts you in a position to take any amount of steaming whatever thrown at you and accept it as truth or fact. For fiction, suspension of disbelief is a necessary component- without it we'd all have to go out and get real jobs. And, for the most part, audiences don't mind it. If they're watching a Superman movie, they'll believe for a short span of time that a guy in blue and red spandex can fly. If they're watching a Steven Segal movie, they'll believe that one portly man with a ponytail can take on a battalion of paramilitary commandoes- although getting them to label him as an "actor" will be just a little bit too much for them to swallow. And if they're watching a vampire movie, they're going to believe that vampires do, in fact, exist.
The tricky part about suspension of disbelief is that it is a two-way street. If your movie, book, mini-series, etc... satisfies people on some basic level, you can get away with murder in spraying graffiti on the notions of logic and common sense. But, if a story breaks down, makes people feel bored or unengaged, they'll come after every little goof and glitch with pitch forks and torches like the pissed off villagers in a black and white horror movie.
Why am I bringing this up? Because I think I need to talk about it before discussing Blade Trinity in full. I've been accused a lot of being a nit-picker, of carping on small, mishandled details in a movie that others think, in a larger picture, aren't that important. Take a scene from Blade Trinity. The stoic hero of this Marvel-inspired trilogy, Blade (Wesley Snipes), is a half-human, half-vampire, all-badass undead hunter who has just been arrested by the FBI for "accidentally" killing a human being during one of his sweeps. Maybe it is the mystery writer in me, but during this sequence I was plagued with questions of what kind of jurisdiction the FBI has in going after vampire hunters, unless of course they've crossed state lines or have been doing their nether-worldly duty on federal property. Also, when the two FBI agents who interrogate Blade begin by calling him a "nutcase" and a "sociopath," I kept thinking to procedural books I've read on interrogation methods and wondering how agents worth their salt could get anywhere in the Bureau with such amateurish tactics.
Are any of these complaints important? No- or at least they wouldn't be if Blade Trinity was a good movie. But it isn't, so there we are. These lapses in reason and fact aren't the cause of bad reviews- they're the symptoms of bad movies. When faced with a movie as thoroughly hollow as this one, your brain doesn't have anything to do but to sit back an analyze the minutia. And the more it does this, the more Blade Trinity begins to unravel.
I have to admit that I still haven't seen the original Blade, even after my positive review of Blade II in 2002. Blade II wasn't any masterwork, but it was helmed by a director (Guillermo Del Toro) who knew how to effortlessly stitch together mucky, body-impaling horror and an elevated sense of sentient, comic-book style storytelling. All of these qualities came through in last April's Hellboy, a movie I have no problems labeling as one of the best of the year. But when Del Toro dropped out of doing the third entry in the series, first-time director David Goyer was given the helm. I like Goyer as a writer- he was one-half of the team that scripted Dark City, one of the best sci-fi movies of the last 10 years. However, if his performance behind the camera could be transmuted and translated to the scenario of a first-time captain of a petroleum supertanker, right now there would be a Club Med island somewhere covered with oil.
Goyer neither seems to know how compose a story visually or to establish effective action set pieces. He's gotten the idea somewhere that a movie like this needs to be shot like a damned music video- I don't think there was a single moment that wasn't being orchestrated to commercialized hip-hop tracks or a pounding electronica score. There's no doubt that everything in this movie is stylized to the Nth degree, but Goyer blindly lets everything else fall to the wayside. A better director wouldn't let Snipes drop every line of dialogue like he was pounding a rubber stamp. A better director would have sown up the story some more so the result didn't look like a flashy video game that might have impressed people five years ago. Blade Trinity literally lives by its own image- and dies by it, too. Minutes into it I was so bored with the VH1 approach that I was wondering exactly how a resurrected vampire who has been buried in Iraq for 4,000 years could wake up and suddenly speak perfect English, but more on that later.
As an action movie, Blade Trinity makes some interesting, and unfortunate, choices. Anyone will tell you that kinetics mean nothing in an action flick. After all, how could I end up so bored in a movie like Cellular that never stopped for a rest? What matters is the quid pro quo- how much damage the hero can inflict on the Bad Guys and how much of that damage can be returned in kind. After he loses his mentor and friend, Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), Blade hooks up with a pair of amateur Van Helsing wanna-bes who call themselves the "Nightstalkers." They certainly kill quite a few bloodsuckers during the course of the film, but exactly how difficult can it be when the vampires just seem run off scared whenever a Nightstalker approaches? Hell, I could do that.
The slap-dash plot has the Vampire Nation reawakening the so-called "first vampire," Dracula, who I would say looks exactly like an ancient Sumerian if ancient Sumerians looked like rejects from the WWF. Other than his ability to walk during the day, I was a little mystified at what exactly "Drake" was bringing to the party or how he was supposed to be the vampires' salvation. Other people, it turns out, have uses for Drake, too. The Nightstalkers are out to use his DNA to concoct an anti-vampire virus. I began to wonder how well this would work out when their Research and Development whiz kid shows us one of their vampire-killing tools: a laser arc that produces a beam "half as hot as the sun." This is hardly a wise move considering that any device producing heat anywhere near as hot as the sun should vaporize everything within miles around it every time it is turned on, but I digress.
The casting, at least, makes for interesting trivia. Indie queen Parker Posey (A Mighty Wind, Best in Show) shows up as a particularly bitchy vampiress, although her exact status in the Vampire Nation is never explained (PR? Development? Marketing?). Fellow Christopher Guest-veteran John Michael Higgins also makes a walk-on as a psychologist who has a few interesting questions about Blade's mother. The rest of the cast is fleshed out by Jessica Biel who, on the upside, can get a guy's heart rate racing with the best of them, but comes off stiffer than the animated corpses she's offing through the entire film. Ryan Reynolds is the supposed comic relief, an ex-vampire now turned hunter whose idea of cleverness involves plenty of four-letter words.
No one expected Blade Trinity to be art, but no one with any standards should want or accept something this undercooked and sloppy, either ( I mean come on, it even uses that old "If you're watching this I'm already dead" plot device!). Yes, this is supposed to be a comic book, but Sam Raimi made excellent comic book films and never let anything slide. And never once during Spider-Man did I ask myself, "How exactly do you swing from skyscrapers using spider webs?" D+
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