Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
At which point the wheels fall off, not just for the franchise, but for Snipes’ career too. As such I’m not sure it’s worth spending all that much time on Blade: Trinity, but here we go.
Snipes returns, of course, alongside Kristofferson, but they’re set up by those naughty vampires, Blade killing a human familiar and being caught on camera, sparking an FBI manhunt for him. Also, weirdly they make a point about trying not to kill humans, despite that not being a problem in the other films. But consistency and logic were apparently not high on David Goyer’s priorities for Trinity.
The other prong in the vampires plan, here headed by Parker Posey’s Danica Talos with WWF wrestler and French-Canadian aristocrat Hunter Hearst Helmsley in tow, is to resurrect Dominic Purcell’s Dracula, or Drake as we’re calling him for… a very good reason, maybe? They manage to do this in short order, and Blade and co must stop them.
Ah, yes, the company, who earlier busted Blade out of FBI gaol. Whistler has been quietly setting up other cells of vampire hunters, and do we have a new team to get acquainted with, however, as they are mostly fridged before they’ve had more than three lines, let’s restrict ourselves to Whistler’s daughter Abigail, Jessica Biel, and ex-vampire Hannibal King, played by Ryan Reynolds.
And, well, so it goes, and I suppose the general set-up’s not all that much worse than the other films, but it’s just spread much thinner across way too many characters. And Dracula’s ability to shape-shift into other forms is seemingly only to confuse the audience, and not the characters in the film, which is a bit of a head scratcher. In a film that’s already struggling to find the time to give its villains much of an identity, it’s a complication it can ill afford.
The action is much less interesting, in no small part because a lot if it is being handled by Jessica Biel and Ryan Reynolds, who are trying their best but just aren’t as convincing as Snipes. However, Snipes was for whatever reason barely playing ball on set, only deigning to come on set for close ups, with his stand-in probably being on camera more than he is in the final cut. That, apparently, meant a lot of the action and trademark cutting barbs goes instead to Reynolds, who’s playing essentially the alpha test version of Deadpool. Watching it this time I recognised lines that ought to have been amusing me, but it seems that when they come out of Reynolds face they’re stripped of humour. Maybe if he was in a mask of some nature it might help.
Now, it’s not a complete disaster, as when Snipes does show up he brings with him flashes of why I liked the other films. In the main, that reason turns out to be “has a lot of Wesley Snipes in it”, and the absence of this is pretty much the reason this outing can’t sustain itself. It turns out to be a flash Wesley Snipes vehicle, and if Snipes isn’t at the wheel, it drives over a cliff. It’s not the world’s worst film, but it’s so far below the last two in terms of fun and competence that I couldn’t even recommend this to completionists.