December 17, 2004 - 4:35 PM

Blade Bad

Matt called me a few nights ago and asked me what I was up to. I told him that I was planning on seeing Blade: Trinity later that night. He sounded like he had just taken a bite out of a lemon stuffed with oysters and tar when he asked "you don't care about the reviews?" I assured him that I was merely in the mood for some mindless action fun. I should have listened to his admonishing tone.

The movie was painfully bad. I attribute it's awfulocity to the director/writer, David Goyer, who wrote the previous two Blade films and whose extensive directorial C.V. includes the well-known blockbuster "Zig-Zag", which he also wrote, and...well...nothing else. He seems to have taken a page from the George Lucas tome of directorial insight in not having a clue as to how to get a convincing performance out of his actors. I'm not saying that any of the actors in this movie are celebrated thespians, but they all have done some fine work in other vehicles, so I know that they aren't crap.

And yet, Wesley Snipes as Blade comes off as a bitchy and amateurish coolcat wannabe instead of the terse, don't-take-no-shit, wicked-sense-of-humor badass he was in the previous installments. Kris Kristofferson's performance comes across like they found a third generation clone of him and put him in the movie while Kris was off doing better things; Parker Posey (Parker POSEY?!) accidentally transposes her snarky hip-chick character from the Josie and the Pussycats movie onto her vampiric ring-leader here, making for one of the least convincing action villains in my recent memory. Her fellow Christopher Guest repertory member, John Michael Higgins, is unconvincing too as a psychiatrist attempting to analyze Blade and Callum Keith Rennie, who some of you might recognize from Due South as Ray/NotRay or from Memento, seems to switch personalities as her brother from scene to scene for no reason. Natasha Lyonne and comedian Patton Oswalt stumble around as WTF?! casting choices, and even they seem confused as to what movie they are in and how they got there.

Interestingly, Jessica Biel and Ryan Reynolds turn in the best performances. Performances which perhaps came from other movies. Reynolds especially is irritatingly likable, throwing out one-liners and puns as if he were in some crazy little sitcom about two guys, a girl, and an italian eaterie. Against the implacable bitchyface of Blade and the other humorless players in the movie, his jokes fall flat, that is, until he's confronted by the vampiric antagonists, at which point he and Parker Posey finally seem to be inhabiting the same movie.

While I found the acting to be the most offensive part of the movie (seriously, if they weren't acting like they didn't know how to act, they were acting like they were part of an improv class where everyone had to pretend they were in a different movie), nearly equally egregious was the lack of logic in the story and the character motivations. Was this supposed to be taking place in NYC, as some indications lead us to believe? Is it even supposed to take place in the U.S., as the use of the F.B.I. and all the American accents suggest? Because if so, then what's with the police chief talking about having to deal with the local magistrate in regards to who has jurisdiction over prosecuting Blade...and what's with the signage for the Police Station, the newstand, the subway, and other places in the city all being half English, half some-eastern-european language? What city in America does that?

Then there's the way that the uber-villain, Drake (who is the very first vampire ever, resurrected), acts all evil and powerful and remorseless in the beginning, but changes to some honor-bound samurai-dink halfway through who can only kill hapless twenty-year-old slackers.

The only reason to maybe watch this movie is for Ryan Reynolds. And that really shouldn't be enough.

Now Listening To :
Random Thought :

What I Just Wrote Before - What I'm About to Write

The Five Most Recent Entries

Here's a hand-picked playlist of 40-plus songs for you to listen to: