After 2 excellent films, Blade 3 completely and utterly falls short. I didn't like it at all because quite frankly, it doesn't feel like a Blade movie, it doesnt sound like a Blade movie and it doesn't fit like a Blade movie. Instead of the fast paced, stylish action we have in the first 2, Trinity is just s-l-o-w, in everything, with no sense of pace or direction. The director, bless him, just can't direct. He's a great writer who served well for the first 2 films, but as we can see here he lacks vision and basic directing skills.
Dracula- nothing about him worked. I don't have a problem with him being in the movie as the first Blade comic had Dracula in it anyway so he has every right to be in the film, it's just his character in it. Terrible design, not enough motivation or character, he was just like every other vampire we have seen, there was nothing about him whatsoever to make him all powerful uber-nasty. Wrong choice of actor to play him too- i think Dominic Purcell is great, but he's not suited to play the Prince of Darkness whatsoever. It's just a forgettable portrayal, and by the end it just looks like a B-movie monster suit.
The crappy humour lets the movie down- there is just no need for it at all, yet we are plagued by it all the time. Renold's character spouting crap, Triple H spouting his crap, hell even the cops do it. The dialogue between Danica and Renolds is just cringe worthy and completely screws with the whole credibility of the film- we just don't take it seriously.
Editing- there's a severe lack of it. Everything just moves too slowly, even the fight sequences aren't fast and frantic, it's like all they do is film someone throw a few punches and slap some faux-pas "techno" music over it to make it look cool, when it doesn't work like that at all. There was a complete lack of proper martial arts choreography in this movie, and when compared to the ultra-stylised kinetic ass-kicking of the first two films, you can see why Trinity completely falls short. It's just not exciting. The talking sequences are even longer- Goyer keeps the camera too long on people, there's no sense of pacing, it's like he want us to show everything going on but dwell on each little thing a bit longer just in case we miss it. It gets long and monotonous to sit there, it's like we are waiting and waiting, there really needed to be a stopwatch in place when editing because everything is just too slow for a Blade movie.
The music is another factor. I think the hip-hop beats provided by the RZA was horrendous. It's not that i hate hip-hop music (which i do) its the fact that here it just wasn't good enough; the lyrics were dire and mostly ridiculous (i remember one song where he just repeats the word "blood" all the time) but the music itself had no power to it, no style; just generic "beats" and poor attempts at techno in the fight scenes. There was no style to any of the music, and again compare the music to the first 2 films (Danny Sabre and Marco Beltrami) it's all orchestral fused with stylised techno, different and original; in Trinity it's nothing like that- more simple and amateur, lacking any motifs that would make it stand out.
Jessica Biel, Renolds- the whole Nightstalkers thing: not needed. It was fresh and new once, but by Blade 3, tech-heavy team vampire slayers just gets old, tired, dated and severely cliché. The geek with all the technobabble, the cool young scientist who knows everything about DNA and gene-splicing, the martial-arts girl...i'm sorry, it's just too boring, we've all seen it a hundred times before. Blade works alone and we assume he's the only guy with the gadgets to take vampires down- he has no need for other people to help him, or sidekicks for that matter, no other people should be introduced to rival him.
Danica Talos and all her cronies- really really bad. Instead of being evil villains, they turned out to be annoying, irritating and by the end a complete joke; merely there for the other characters to make fun out of (which they all did). Parker Posey and Triple H just didn't add anything new to the table. She's the wise-ass bitch, Triple H is the meathead grunt. Again, it's boring, dated and cliché, nothing threatening about them either considering they always get their asses kicked.
There's a lot of other stuff too which i can't remember right now, but yeah- the film is just a long, slooow mess of things. Goyer can write well, he just can't direct, and this is where most of the problems are. They should have got someone else, and i'm sure it would have been a lot better. Even if Snipes gave it a go, he would have done a better job.
At is stands, it's the worst of the trilogy and a complete waste of a premise- it was simply not needed at all, and it tarnishes the quality of the series- Blade would have been an excellent trilogy had it not been for Trinity. Oh well.
Verdict: A slow and monotonous chore. 2/10
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