Cynical Cinema

Alliance Films came out with the Blade trilogy on August 26th.  It’s a two-disc edition, with two of the movies on one disc and one on the other.  There are no terrific special features, it’s just a plain, bargain set of the three Blade films in a package that is conveniently the same size as every other DVD in your collection.  And if you don’t have these films already, this is one you should add to your collection.  Here’s why:

Blade (8/10):  The original Blade movie was terrific, a real breath of fresh air in the world of comic book movies.  Wesley Snipes was big, muscular, bad-ass and mean.  Kris Kristofferson was amazing as Whistler, Blade’s mentor.  And Stephen Dorff was terrific as the bad guy, a vampire who wanted to trigger the Blood Tide - an event that would, I think, turn everyone in the world into a vampire.  Or something.  The point is, this movie was awesome.  Sword fighting, guns, vampires disintegrating and great special effects, and Snipes as the most ass-kicking, toughest, meanest comic book character of all time.  There was even some good comedy - mostly provided by Donal Logue, who kept getting his arm chopped off.  And for the really cult comic book fans - some appearances by Traci Lords and Udo Kier.  Terrific!

Blade II (10/10):  By far, the best of the series.  Directed by Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth), this film is as pulse-pounding and visually impressive as any comic book adaptation could aspire to be.  (Well, until 2008 when The Dark Knight came along.)  Snipes is now even more bad-ass, and he is given some awfully cool villains with which to work.  Luke Goss appears as Nomak, a new breed of vampire that preys on both humans AND vampires.  So now the vampires want a truce with Blade, because they are after the same enemy for once.  And Blade hooks up with the Blood Pack, a cheesily-named group of vampire bad-asses who have been training their whole lives to kill Blade, but now must work with him.  Ron Perlman, as the tough-guy leader of the Blood Pack, is amazing.  And even the secondary characters are cool actors - Norman Reedus as a stoner hippie helping Blade and Whistler, and Asian action movie legend Donnie Yen even shows up as a kung-fu fighting member of the Blood Pack.  And the vampire princess, played by Leonor Varela, is one of the hottest women ever in a movie.  Visually stunning, never-ending action, and some seriously bad-ass characters and actors made this movie not just a guilty pleasure, but the best in the trilogy.

Blade: Trinity (3/10):  One of the biggest letdowns I have ever had at a movie.  Del Toro is gone as director, replaced by David S. Goyer.  Kristofferson is gone early in the film, replaced by Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel.  And I really like Ryan Reynolds - he even has some solid comedic scenes in this film.  But an action star?  Jessica Biel an action star?  I know she really wants to be, and she keeps trying and trying to be one, but she isn’t an action star.  Or a great actress.  She’s hot.  That’s about it.  I mean, stick to movies where you are hot.  Those, you can do.  Blade II had Ron Perlman and Donnie Yen.  Blade Trinity can only suffer by comparison.  But it isn’t just Reynolds and Biel that are the problem.  Snipes is the only genuine action star in the movie, but he is given just about nothing to do.  The script is dreadful, the concept just doesn’t work, and there are some really long, extended scenes that make absolutely no sense.  The other Blade films were genuinely dark, tough, gritty entries that could, on some level, be considered horror films.  This one is an absolute joke.  Not only that, Blade is now the co-star.  In his own film.  Because Biel and Reynolds are the real action stars.  Come on!  This one is total garbage.

 The two-disc Blade trilogy came out August 26th from Alliance Films.  Pick it up!  And ignore that third one.

Donal Logue is a pretty funny actor. He starred in one of my favourite films, the very-underrated Tao of Steve, in 2000. In that movie, he played an overweight, lazy slacker who still somehow managed to score every hot chick he came across. It was a great movie and a great role, because he was so slovenly and yet charming at the same time. And on some level, in some weird way, it absolutely made sense that he would be able to have sex with all these women. In the new film from Alliance Films, Almost Heaven, Logue plays a similar character. He is a television director who can no longer get work because he’s a drunk. One of those lovable, one-day-at-a-time, funny drunks, but I guess drunk enough to not work in Canada. So he gets sent to Scotland, to produce a fishing show, in a village where half the people are alcoholics, and the others still drink with breakfast. And although he’s a drunken slob, fat, who clearly pays no attention to his personal hygiene, he is still fighting off women at every turn. If there is a hot woman in this movie, there is a scene where she tries to sleep with him. It made sense in the Tao of Steve, it doesn’t so much make sense here.

So Logue goes to Scotland to film this show, and he has to do it with…his ex-wife! Hilarity will ensue! Anything that can go wrong will go wrong! There are no fish for the fishing show, people fall in the water, drunks fall over…it’s basically a sit-com for an hour in the middle. A very low-budget sit-com, where some of the scenes look like they were printed on the first take to save some money. Which doesn’t really hurt the film, in fact it adds to the small-town feel of the piece. Although therein lies a problem - the movie doesn’t feel to me like small-town Scotland. It feels like small-town Canada. Which is kind of a problem. The whole town feels like it was picked up in Scotland and dropped right into the middle of the prairies, such that half the actors seem like extras from Braveheart, and the other half think they are in an episode of Corner Gas.

Somehow, although Logue being a drunk is the central theme of the movie, and the question of “will he be able to overcome his problem and become successful” is the recurring theme, his drinking never really seems to actually be a problem. We see him take a drink, we see him get kind of tipsy, we know he is drinking because he gets other people to take his urine test for him, but it never appears to affect his work. The worst thing that happens to him is he sleeps in and misses breakfast a few days in a row. He falls for a local girl played by the gorgeous and charming Kristy Mitchell, and they have the inevitable fight that leads to the inevitable reconciliation, but it all feels strange, because a girl that hot and that smart and witty and together would be able to find a guy who wasn’t a fat ugly drunken slob. One would think. Logue’s small amount of charm in the film is not enough to justify his landing the best looking girl in the movie. This would be kind of like watching The Princess Bride, only Cary Elwes doesn’t get the girl because she’s fallen for Andre The Giant.

All this being said, Almost Heaven is almost good. As far as Canadian indie movies go, it’s sweet, charming and at times a little funny, thanks mostly to Donal Logue and Kristy Mitchell. Outside those two, there is very little to recommend this movie on any grounds. It’s a story we’ve seen before a hundred times, and it goes through the motions until it is over. Only Mitchell and Logue rise above.