#in my dps bullshit posting era

[sizzy-ling]

Knox realizes he is actually dating Charlie after at least six months of the two of them being the most nauseating not-couple anyone has ever met

[therealkn]

David’s Resolution - Day 18

Day 18 (January 18, 2019)

Blade: Trinity (2004)

“In the movies, Dracula wears a cape, and some old English guy always manages to save the day at the last minute with crosses and holy water. But everybody knows the movies are full of shit. The truth is, it started with Blade, and it ended with him. The rest of us were just along for the ride.”

In 1997, Batman & Robin was released to theaters and... well, a lot of people didn’t like it. In fact, many say it’s one of the worst movies ever made. The first part is true as it was slammed by critics and audiences upon release and has cultivated a considerable notoriety for its badness; the second part is false because trust me, it is FAR from the worst ever made. If you unironically consider Batman & Robin one of the worst films ever, please tell me what your criteria are for determining whether a film is “one of the worst ever”, because I think that criteria is lacking. But one thing that is for certain about Batman & Robin is that it, along with the failure of Steel that same year, more or less killed DC Comics’ hold in the box office. They struggled for several years with other films until finally seeing success again with 2005′s Batman Begins, which was a critical and commercial success and started Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight Trilogy” of Batman films.

In between those Batman films, however, Marvel Comics decided to take another shot at movies after some... not-so-great films. And we got Blade. Hell yeah.

Telling the stylish and action-packed tale of the half-vampire Blade (Wesley Snipes) who hunts down vampires and does so in the coolest way possible, Blade - released one year after Batman & Robin - was a critical and commercial success, Marvel’s first in the box office. This was impressive not only because it was a comic book movie and people were questioning the viability of the genre after Batman & Robin, but also because it was an R-rated comic book movie featuring a more obscure character instead of someone more well-known to audiences. Blade was a pretty cool, stylish, badass movie and while X-Men and Spider-Man would become bigger and more famous successes, I’d like to think that Blade started Marvel’s new era of superhero movies and influenced their approach to making future films, especially when it came to looking into more obscure properties to adapt to film like the Guardians of the Galaxy.

And then there was Blade II, released in 2002 and directed by my guy Guillermo del Toro. This was a sequel that was even better than the original in practically every way. The villain was cooler and surprisingly sympathetic (not being mean to you, Stephen Dorff, you were great in the first film, but I’m just saying), the story has some neat twists to it, the characters are great and memorable, the action’s exciting and one-ups the sequences in the first movie, and it has Del Toro’s distinctive visual style for days.

And then came Blade: Trinity, which cocked the whole thing up. In order to properly prepare for this film, I watched the other two films (I’ve seen them before, which is why I’m not writing full reviews for them). I had actually tried to watch this years ago but only got as far as the first act because younger David somehow thought it was that bad. That’s the younger David who would have probably disliked watching sex, lies, and videotape.

This movie’s premise is simple: the vampire world has decided that in order to destroy Blade, they hit the Godzilla threshold and awaken Dracula (Dominic Purcell), the very first vampire ever to exist, to help them fight. And this time, Blade’s not doing it alone. Okay, he wasn’t always alone, as he had his mentor Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) in the other two films and- oh, they kill off Whistler in the first act, wow, that’s some bullshit. Well, now Blade has become part of a group of vampire hunters called the Nightstalkers, and accompanying him is the wisecracking Hannibal King (Ryan Reynolds) and Whistler’s daughter Abigail (Jessica Biel). Okay, the stakes are raised - pun unintended, promise - and this is going to be the biggest challenge yet for Blade.

Speaking of Ryan Reynolds... he’s the best thing in this movie ,getting that out there right now. His character, Hannibal King, could best be described as “Deadpool Lite”. He calls his vampire ex a cock-juggling thundercunt, which is one of the greatest insults of all time and that alone makes him great. I can see why some people would find him annoying or grating, but I like to think of it as a dry run for his playing the Merc with a Mouth, which is funny considering that around this time, Reynolds was hearing about the Deadpool character. In fact, after this movie, Reynolds would begin the twelve-year-long journey of bringing DP to the big screen, which would involve playing a character named Wade Wilson in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

I’m sorry, this movie is not great. It’s just a big disappointing letdown. One of the problems with the movie is with Blade. Not the character himself, he’s still pretty cool and Wesley Snipes is great. I mean that this doesn’t feel like his movie. In the other two movies, it was pretty clear he was the guy in charge, especially in Blade II when he made it clear to the vampires he formed a truce with that he was not someone you screw with. But in this one, he just kinda gets shunted off for several other characters. To their credit, Marvel would get better at ensemble films (The Avengers, ‘nuff said), but in this one, it just feels sad. We watched this movie because we want more of Blade. But it feels like they put him in the back seat to focus more on other characters. He’s the title character for fuck’s sake, and yet he feels like he’s a side character in his own movie. Just like what happened with Tom and Jerry...

What doesn’t help either is that the film is one of those “too many things happening for its own good” films. The movie’s got too much going on and it feels confusing. What’s this film about? Is it about Blade fighting Dracula with the Nightstalkers? Is it about the vampire world finally getting the law to crack down on Blade? Is it about the vampire’s plans to completely subjugate the world? It doesn’t seem to know which one it wants to focus on, which really hurts considering that this is supposed to be the biggest threat that the vampire hunters of the world ever faced, and yet Dracula seems like less of a legitimate threat than Deacon Frost in the first movie or the Reaper virus in the second. And it’s not the only third film in a superhero film series to have this problem, as X-Men: The Last Stand had this same problem with too much happening. Again, Marvel at least got better at juggling multiple plotlines in superhero movies with their cinematic universe, so there is that.

There’s a lot of other problems big and small, and a good chunk of them can probably be traced back to Wesley Snipes. The production of this film was pretty screwed up, and a lot of it is due to him. David S. Goyer, who wrote all the Blade films including this one, ended up directing it when no one else wanted to take the job. Snipes was unhappy with Goyer’s decision to direct, and both he and Kris Kristofferson were unhappy with the script, which is probably why Kristofferson’s character is killed off early on. (Reminds me of what they did with RoboCop’s partner in RoboCop 3, another third movie in a series that sucked.) Not only that, but Snipes was hostile to Goyer as well as Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel; at one point, Hannibal King says “He doesn’t like me, does he?”, which was not Hannibal talking about Blade, but Reynolds talking about Snipes. Snipes also apparently refused to leave his trailer for any scenes that didn’t show his face, so his stunt double did a lot of the Blade scenes. His working relationship with Goyer got so bad that he called him a racist several times for no reason and refused to speak to him, communicating only in Post-It notes. The fact that the final film got finished and is... watchable... is pretty impressive.

This film, sadly, killed off the Blade franchise. New Line Cinema’s problems with Wesley Snipes led to them making a short-lived TV show on Spike TV with someone else playing the Daywalker, and then Snipes got sent to prison for tax evasion and the Blade character’s film rights reverted to Marvel during his prison term. He’s been in talks with Marvel Studios to bring the character back, but so far they’ve said they have no plans for the character in the future. Here’s hoping we get more Blade in the future.

I should also mention that the version I saw was the unrated cut, which doesn’t really add more violence or swears or other things cut for an MPAA rating as all the Blade movies were rated R. It has some more plot and character stuff, but that doesn’t help the movie much when compared to the theatrical version. The biggest change is the ending, which includes the infamous shot of Blade’s opening eyes being superimposed over his face when Snipes refused to open his eyes in the scene.

This movie’s a mess, plain and simple. It is without a doubt the weakest film in the Blade trilogy, which sucks because it could have been better. If they had trimmed some of the plotlines and focused more on Blade than his companions, it would have been better. Like Mimic 3, I don’t hate the film, I just find it disappointing with how it could have been better. For what it is, it’s still watchable, but it’s just a muddled mess of a movie. Not sure if I’d recommend it. I’d definitely recommend the other two Blade films.

Also, if any of you are hoping for me to review more Marvel movies as part of this resolution, you may be out of luck, sadly. I’ve seen all the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, as I had to catch up in time for Avengers: Infinity War, as well as all the X-Men films and spinoffs and the 2003 Hulk, which I actually really liked, even more than some MCU films (to which someone will say “it’s okay, you can just say Thor: The Dark World”). ...Although I haven’t seen the Amazing Spider-Man films yet...

Next time: How about a GOOD comic book movie from 1997?