Blade: Trinity

I didn't have high hopes for Blade: Trinity.

I loved the original Blade movie. It was innovative, stylish, and had an African-American half-vampire who took himself seriously. It was a serious comic book movie with an urban style about it. Watching it a few years later, the movie still holds up well. And the soundtrack really kicked it into high gear.

Blade II was an embarrassment. It had bad special effects (yes, I can tell when ninjas are entirely computer graphics), a lame rip-off of an Aliens plot, it killed off and then brought back a major character (BOO!), and most unforgivable of all...had wrestling moves.

Let me say that again: WRESTLING. MOVES.

The last time I saw a movie seriously incorporate wrestling moves into a film, it was Rowdy Roddy Piper spending way too much time pile driving the bad guy in They Live. It was ridiculous, but we expected nothing less from Roddy, 'cause, ya know, he's a wrestler.

When a villain climbs a sheer wall just to do a flying elbow to the throat of the hero, you can tell the director thinks his audience is made up of ten-year olds, confusing "comic book" with "kiddie fare." Thank you, Mr. Goyer, for giving Blade back his dignity. Of course, I just checked the Internet Movie Database and it looks like Goyer wrote the second movie too...

Anyway, Blade: Trinity injects a healthy dose of modern day skepticism into Blade's (Wesley Snipes) vampire hunting activities. When the vampires can't deal with Blade by killing him outright, they finally decide to manipulate the FBI and the news media by having one of their cronies sacrifice his life. In essence, Blade is tricked into killing a real human.

The result: he is treated like a serial killer by the public and by government agencies. But the vampires own them too, so it's not long before Blade is in seriously dire straits.

That's where the Nightstalkers come in, consisting primarily (but not exclusively) of Hannibal King (Ryan Reynolds) and Abigail Whistler (Jessica Biel). Reynolds is like a buffed up version of Jason Lee. He's funny, he's insecure, and he just won't shut up. Biel, who has always had an unearthly, elfin appearance, plays a wildcat that enjoys unleashing her inner rage on vampires while she listens to her iPod.

Snipes plays the straight man in this film, which is just as well, because Biel pouts in the background while Reynolds has a manic energy that steals every scene. By far the best acting kudos must go to the iPod, which is a major character unto itself. It provides various soundtracks, it dutifully stays out of sight when Abigail puts the ear buds in her ears (she listens to music while she kills vampires, ya see), and it gets way more camera time than any MP3 player should.

The music is perfectly pitched, harkening back to the original movie's dance club beats. The director has fun with the movie by adding little touches, like advertising a future human crony of the vampires (a "familiar") by flashing his wrist tattoo on screen for just a second. There's a great scene where our heroes run through a mall, and the relentless pounding beat is replaced by...Muzak. And of course, whenever Blade jumps ten stories out of a building, he hits the ground so hard that car alarms go off.

But there is a big, ugly flaw in this movie.

It isn't Danica Talos (Parker Posy), who plays her Acid Princess role to the hilt, complete with having difficulty talking around her fangs and wobbling in her high heels.

It isn't Jarko Grimwood (Paul Michael Levesque), a wrestler of all things, who is actually appropriately menacing, stupid, cowardly, and violent.

It's Dracula. Oh, I'm sorry. In this movie they call him Drake (Dominic Purcell).

The movie takes great pains to separate itself from the image of Dracula, but by doing so robs itself of the entire point of having Dracula in a movie-so you know all about the original Hollywood vampire.

Purcell is a monster all right, in a smarmy Euro-trash sort of way. His penetrating gaze and his massive neck are entirely out of place with the ancestral being he's supposed to be. Purcell can't pull off the long dialogue scenes he has with Blade convincingly. Drake speaks in slow, menacing tones and he really hates the commercialization of Dracula. Which is ironic, because Dracula would probably really hate his portrayal in this movie.

By the end of the film, the climactic battle looks and feels a lot like Highlander than a vampire movie. We needed an elegant yet malevolent villain, not an overbearing thug-that's what Levesque is for.

Lurking somewhere in the background is a lame plot about a genetic virus that will kill all vampires "in the vicinity." And a little girl and a cute baby are endangered. And Danica and Hannibal have this hate/hate thing going back when he was a vampire. It's complicated.

And yet, I really enjoyed this movie. I laughed at most of King's lines. Even when his jokes fall flat, King knows they fall flat, and adds such self-effacing humor as, "I'm sorry, I had a lot of sugar today" or "he doesn't like me very much."

Ultimately, the real joke here is that very concept of vampires is ridiculous. Every vampire looks like a refugee from Stick Model Camp and acts like it, rolling their eyes, harrumphing in their pretty vampire way, or flexing and snarling at just the right moments. How can we possibly take them seriously? They're like, one step above zombies for sheer comedy!

Of course, the subtle humor will not sit well with vampire fans that think vampires should be cool. The movie comes down pretty firmly on the side of the good guys: the good guys look cool and the vampires look like bumbling idiots. Let there be no doubt, Goyer's having some fun at his own expense and mocking the vampire genre.

I mean, seriously, this movie has vampire dogs.

For that alone, it gets four stars.