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.

Stick Jason Statham, Wesley Snipes and Ryan Phillippe in a movie together, and what do you have? A certified, genuine, authentically stamped no-bones-about-it B-movie. These are B list guys all the way, and although Snipes has had breakthrough moments, he is no longer box office gold. Or even silver. Or copper. And Phillippe, while he once looked like an actor with promise, he has now been surpassed in the very same roles by - believe it or not - his doppleganger Justin Timberlake. He is now best known as the ex-husband of Reese Witherspoon. Bottoms out. And Statham makes forty movies a year, twenty of which are just explosions and guns and fights, and twenty of which are explosions and guns and fights and Big Twist endings. Chaos is one of the latter. Look out! Here comes the Big Twist Ending! I don’t mind saying this, because the twist really sucks.

So does most of the movie. It opens with a standoff on a bridge. The hostage is…duhduhduh…a congressman’s daughter! A CONGRESSMAN! His daughter! This makes things that much more difficult because you see…he’s a congressman! Americans seem to have a lot of love for their congressmen, and a lot of fear when it comes to their Powers. It seems pretty logical to them that if you screw up a hostage situation with the daughter of…a congressman! then that congressman will take your job and ruin your career and possibly, if he has a long reach…get you killed. Can you imagine a Canadian movie doing this? Like, the daughter of an NDP MPP gets kidnapped, and the cops all walk on eggshells because he’s…an MPP! HE’s the GUY who controls a portion of the Senior’s Secretariat! Better watch yourselves on this one, boys. Don’t mess this one up. He’s an MPP.

Anyway, that takes up only about six seconds, and ends abruptly, so we know that we will be getting the rest of the snippets from that event throughout the movie, and we know that if we saw the entire scene at once, we would instantly figure out the Big Twist Ending, so we wait. The fallout from the big Congressman’s Daughter incident was that one cop was fired, and another was suspended. We see this cop’s house, and he has used up an entire wall by plastering it with newspaper clippings from the incident. He does this not because any rational disgraced cop would do so, but because it makes it easy for a camera to pan over the collage, letting us in on the beginning of the story without having to resort to a narrator. The fact that not one of the six hundred newspaper clippings actually says anything about the incident itself, or has any pictures that would give things away, makes sense. THAT information has to come out SLOWLY, over the course of the movie!

Then Wesley Snipes robs a bank. Snipes seems to really relish playing the bad guy lately, and he’s basically playing Blade, only as a bank robber. The cops show up and there is a standoff…just like every other standoff in every other bad movie, no cop listens to the commander. Once the order has been given to go in, the SWAT team cowboys will not stop. They will then ignore all subsequent orders. This has happened in maybe seven thousand movies, and zero times in real life. Some great lines ensue, like “Are you ADD?” Apparently, judging by the way this line is delivered, ADD, or Attention Deficit Disorder, is the new “retarded”. Only more PC, because it doesn’t mock the intellectually challenged. The bad guys get away, of course, because they are super-well organized and have it all figured out. The WAY they get away - never really explained. And if they think they HAVE explained it, they’re ADD.

There follows a car chase. This is one of those chases in which a motorcycle chases a car. The motorcycle starts off six feet behind the car. What this motorcyclist believes he can do to apprehend the suspect once he catches the car, we are not sure. However, he decides that being six feet behind the car is not good enough. He must take a shortcut in order to make up that distance. This shortcut goes through buildings, alleys, fruit stands, windows, and causes hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to the city, but it was worth it! Because he emerges from the window into the street and ends up…six feet behind the car! The chase continues…I sure do love these movie scenes. They make terrific sense.

Then there is the cop who will do ANYTHING to get his man, the elimination of the suspects, the murder of the witnesses, and this incredibly silly and stupid bit about chaos theory. The movie thinks this is a smart idea to throw on top of the movie - the concept being that what seems random on the surface is, upon further investigation, actually a pattern that can be quantified. Which would make sense only if what we see on the surface appears random, or if the subsequent underlying pattern existed. Neither is true of this movie. The ending is more than predictable, and given how smart they think their cops are (chaos theory!) the whole thing should have been as painfully obvious to them as it is to us, the viewers. Chaos is just silly, and that would be fine for a movie, except that it thinks it is more than that. It believes it is smart, but really it is just ADD.