WARNING: The movie being reviewed here contains scenes of violence, blood, and strong language throughout and may be frightening for younger audiences. Reader discretion advised. So many f-bombs being dropped here.

*Sigh* Uncanny Fox here, continuing my Halloween look at the Blade franchise with a review of the last installment of the trilogy, the often-mocked, much regretted Blade Trinity. And contrary to the name, Jeri Hogarth does not appear here.

Sure enough after the second film’s success, a third one was green-lit for the winter of 2004, already a big year for comic book movies due to the release of Spider-Man 2 (then again, Catwoman also came out that year, so it’s a wash), and it seemed like we were all in for another fun romp of vampire slaying. At first, the plot was going to be set in the future, with Blade guarding the last humans from the ruling vampire hoards. But the producers at New Line thought this story was either too depressing or too expensive, so they passed in favor of… what we got instead.

And it turned out that was only the first and least pressing issue in the film’s development, as multiple directors, such as past heads Stephen Norrington and Guillermo del Toro, as well as Downfall Oliver Hirschbiegel (aka the guy responsible for all those Hitler Rants vids on YouTube – somebody should do one for this movie) all turned it down due to prior commitments. So, in an ill-advised move, writer David S. Goyer took the reins in what would be his first and among his relatively few directing credits. For reasons that should be evident from the finished product, but more on that later.

This didn’t sit well with star Wesley Snipes, who clashed with Goyer at every turn due to disliking the script and his own reduced role in the movie, which seemed more focused on setting up a potentional spin-off with the new characters introduced than the guy the flick is actually named after. As told by Patton Oswalt here, Snipes would refuse to film any more scenes that were absolutely necessary, requiring the use of a stand-in during non-closeup shots and in one extreme instance, superimposing CG eyes onto him when he refused to open them in a deleted shot. In addition, he would lock himself in his trailer and smoke weed all day, got into a physical altercation with Goyer over a racially-charged misunderstanding, and towards the end of production, started only talking to anyone via Post-It notes sighed “from Blade.” In fact, he didn’t like anybody during filming, with one line from Ryan Reynolds (“He hates me, doesn’t he?”) actually being taken from a comment Reynolds made on set. Indeed, Blade Trinity is one of those movies where a movie about how they made the movie would be better than the actual movie.

So, what we have here is an inexperienced director and a star that hated everyone and everything to do with the movie. Surely, everyone else pulled together in the face of these hardships and produced a worthwhile ending to this groundbreaking and influential franchise, right? Uhhhh… you’ll see…

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Blade Movie To Bring You The Opening Cutscene Of Devil May Cry

A bumbling group of vampires unearth the tomb of the most infamous bloodsucker of all: Dracula, or as he’s called now, Drake, who they wish to join up with in order to take over humanity once and for all. Meanwhile, Blade gets himself into some hot holy water when he inadvertently kills a Familiar on camera, triggering a country-wide manhunt that ends with Whistler dead and the Daywalker in FBI custody… at least until he’s rescued by Deadpool and the girl from 7th Heaven. They, along with Spence from King of Queens and a few others who are barely worth mentioning, form a vampire-hunting splinter cell called the Nightstalkers. And they’re preparing a doomsday weapon to end the vampires once and for all: a deadly virus called the Daystar, which they hope to infect Drake with. An issue arises as they aren’t sure if it will affect Blade, given his half-vampire nature, but they press on when Drake attacks them, leading to a final confrontation with the King of Vampires. This results in either Drake using his body as a decoy for the feds as a parting gift to Blade or Blade waking up in the morgue and possibly giving into his vampire urges, depending on which cut of the movie you’re watching. There was also a deleted ending where Blade dies and the Nightstalkers continue the good fight against a new werewolf threat, but this was rejected on account of how dumb the werewolf looked. Oh, and Triple H raises vampire dogs.

Admittedly, the movie has a lot of great ideas: the FBI hunting Blade, how humanity at large sees the whole “war against the vampires” thing, a secret order sworn to help Blade, the blood harvesting plant, Blade fighting Dracula, and the anti-vampire bio-weapon. The problem is that all these ideas are all crammed into one movie without any rhyme or reason, and the plot is all over the place for it. The first 20 minutes or so have Blade running from the law, but after the Nightstalkers break him out of their prison, the FBI agent that seems hellbent on catching Blade all but vanishes from the plot until the very end. A scene at a vampire blood harvesting plant, something that was part of the original “apocalypse” draft of the script, is pretty much tacked-on in a single scene, serving only as a reason for Blade and Abigail to leave the hideout long enough for Drake to kill everyone not played by Ryan Reynolds.

The editing is rough in some parts as well, with the usual high-quality fight scenes being undercut by jarring cuts and odd camera zooms, such as when Triple H is about to kill Hannibal towards the end, with an unnecessary series of flashes as The Game lifts Deadpool by the throat. Goyer’s no director, and it’s pretty obvious here.

And then there’s the dialogue, which most of the time sounds like the sort of thing a 12-year-old would say after he overheard his dad listening to George Carlin’s “7 Words.” David Goyer has written some of the best superhero movies of all time (along with some of the worst, but that’s a discussion for another day), but he strikes me as the kind of writer who needs a filter for his scripts. Here, he’s the sole writer, and it shows. Ryan Reynolds (more on him later) does what he can to save the script, but everyone else ends up looking like they’re in a South Park sketch whenever they open their mouths, although there are a few memorable and amusing lines sprinkled throughout. I sense a list coming up…

The final area of note is the overall awkwardness of the acting in this movie, no doubt brought on by the hostility behind the scenes. This is prevalent anytime Blade and the Nightstalkers are talking or going somewhere, such as when Patton Oswalt gives a weapon demonstration that doesn’t lead to anything major or when they’re driving to question some familiars. Everyone involved seriously looks like they don’t want to be there. And, if Oswalt’s backstage stories are any indication, they didn’t.

Sadly, This Is The Only Cool Thing He Does In This Movie

Blade is pretty wooden here as opposed to the past films, no doubt due to Snipes’s problems on set. As for Whistler, he doesn’t have a chance to do much save for give Blade some foreshadowy advice about needing friends before sacrificing himself so the Daywalker can escape the Feds – which he doesn’t even do! Though I will say, him flipping off the cops before blowing the warehouse up was kind of cool. And we do get some emotion from Blade as he surrenders himself to the FBI, taking in the fact that his surrogate father is truly dead this time. But yeah, the two main characters get the short end here.

This Is About The 10th Time Someone’s Broken Him Out Of Some Kind Of Confinement

Drake, aka Dracula (played by Dominic Purcell of Prison Break and Legends Of Tomorrow fame), is the primary villain of the movie. He’s the first vampire in existence and the most powerful, capable of transforming into a demonic Groot-like form that admittedly looks kind of cool for its limited screentime and even shapeshifting into other people. He allies himself with Posey and her gang in order to kill Blade and… take over the world, I guess? His goals aren’t really that well defined (unlike Frost and Damoskinos), and he’s not much more than a generic “evil overlord” type. The vampires want to use his blood to become Daywalkers, but that’s more their thing than his. Although he does go on about “honor” and “living by the sword,” sharing that quality with Blade, and even gives him a “parting gift” after he dies by using his body as a decoy for the Feds in the Theatrical Cut. But then again, he does throw a baby off a roof and kill a blind person at one point, so that “honor” bit is a little shaky…

These People All Peaked In Middle School

And sadly, the rest of the villains aren’t threatening in the slightest. Aside from Drake, they’re all pretty much on the level of Team Rocket, and they are frequently taken down by even the human protagonists. Not to mention Parker Posey constantly struggling to speak through her fangs, and the fact that I couldn’t name any of them aside from Posey and Triple H, both of whom are nothing to really note acting wise. The only time any of them get anywhere close to being menacing is when Posey is threatening to turn King back into a vampire, then force him to feed on Zoe, the little girl the Nightstalkers are looking after. She actually manages to be kind of scary there, and the look on King’s face as she describes all this is heartrending. That and me not wanting to pick a fight with Triple H, but that doesn’t count.

Vampire Hunting Mercenary Pikachu Doesn’t Have Quite The Same Ring To It

Same goes for the Nightstalkers, save for Abigail and Hannibal. The movie makes them out to be this badass vampire-hunting organization with members all around the world, but all we really see are a small group of scrubs without much in the way of characterization, and they all get unceremoniously killed off after about two or three scenes of screen time.

But we then get to one of the movie’s few saving graces in the form of Ryan Reynolds’s wise-cracking former vampire, Hannibal King, as it’s pretty much Reynolds doing a dry run for his later turn as Deadpool…

Suddenly, the screen fills with static, then cuts to Deadpool sitting in that living room from the teaser preview from the first movie, pipe in hand.

Deadpool: Joke’s on you, muchacho. I’m never dry…

Fox: [Confused] Deadpool? Wait, you’re real? What are you doing on my blog? How’d you even hack into the site, anyway?

Deadpool: I work at a school with a boy who doesn’t sleep and can change TV channels with his mind. Any mutant that can help me do whatever the writers want me to is a simple yell down the hall away.

Fox: That’s the “how,” it still doesn’t cover the “why…”

Deadpool: Why? Does there have to be a “why?” I’m just saying “Hidy-Ho, good neighbor.” After all, I’ve got a feeling we’re going to be doing this again sometime in the future. [Wiggles fingers and whispers] Cryptic Foreshadowing… Welp, I’m up for my next set on The Masked Singer. [Whispers] I’m the Walrus…

Fox: Wait, wait…

The screen cuts to static again, then everything is back to normal.

Fox: That was weird. Anyway, Reynolds’s natural fast-talking, straight faced charm shines through even as he delivers some of the dumbest (or most awesomely dumb) lines ever put to screen. He always brings a smile anytime he’s onscreen, whether that’s him awkwardly trying to make conversation with Blade (reflecting the real-life hostilities on set), or cracking wise while he’s being interrogated by Posey and her gang. In the comics, he was still a vampire (and an old man to boot), but the character was re-imagined to accommodate Reynolds’ casting. And the movie is slightly better for it.

So This Is What Happens When You Leave The Camden House

Jessica Biel as Abigail Whistler, the estranged daughter of Whistler from another relationship with an arsenal of trick arrows that would make Green Arrow reconsider his life choices, is another standout, due to just how cool she looks whenever she’s onscreen. Biel actually trained to use a bow and arrow for months prior to filming, and even accidentally destroyed a camera during one scene in the climax. The only real issue I have is how neither Whistler nor Blade even hinted at her existence prior to this movie, and that there’s a sudden, tacked-on scene with her father talking to her even though it’s implied that they weren’t really that close. That and the whole iPod thing is dumb.

And I will say that the scene introducing her is pretty cool as well. A group of vampire punks thinks she’s walking down the street with a baby, and mark her as an easy target. But when they try to make a meal out of her, she reveals that the baby’s fake… and it’s them that’s on the menu tonight. She kicks a few of them to the ground with a knife sticking from her boot, jumps to her feet, takes off her coat, beats the Smackdown on another vampire, judo tosses another one that makes the mistake of trying to grab her from behind, kills him with seem kind of UV lightsaber bowstring that’s never used again, then turns back around to the last one and repeats his previous taunt back at him before stabbing him in the neck with an Assassin’s Creed wrist-blade. Biel did her homework for this role, and her spot-on fight choreography proves it.

I Can’t Wait For Deapool’s Rematch Appearance At Wrestlemainia Next Year

The action scenes are about on par with the past movies, albeit with tons of awkward editing and a major nerfing of the vampires throughout. In the past, Blade himself (a vampire-human hybrid) at least struggled somewhat with vampires while unarmed, but here a very human Jessica Biel lays waste to countless grunts without a sweat being broken. Add in the mediocre villains, and the threat level of hominis nocturna is all but ruined. But at least we get some cool scenes out of it, though…

We open up with a car chase through the streets of wherever, with Blade running down and shooting the vampires that come in his path. And before that is a cool little fight scene where he whips out a cool knife that shoots out in a zipline of sorts. Other scenes include the breakout scene and subsequent fight in a prison hallway, a fight against Drake in the psychiatrist’s office that soon spills onto the rooftops and city streets, a rescue scene where Blade and Abigail save King and Zoe from Posey and her crew, a fight through the hallways of Drake’s hideout, and finally a confrontation with the vampire lord himself. All pretty cool, but not anything we haven’t already enjoyed in far better movies.

A Case Study In Both Horrible Green Screen And Camera Placement

Now, before I give my final thoughts, here are some more brief highlights:

The sudden strobe scene when Drake first awakens, right after he rips a dude’s head off. Yet another example of the awkward editing on display.

Hold up, did Blade just kick a guy on fire in the junk? I don’t know if that’s awesomely stupid or stupidly awesome.

Okay, it was established in the first movie that Blade can sense vampires near him, so there’s no way a Familiar could have tricked him like that. And for that matter, how was said Familiar even able to stand, much less walk, after that nasty wreck he suffered. Seriously, that car was straight up dismantled!

Another contradiction to previous lore: I thought La Magra was the creator of the vampire race. So now why is Dracula now the Progenitor?

Okay Posey, you see Drake feeding on someone out of control, and you know he almost killed you back in the desert. So naturally, you’re going to waltz right into his cell. Riiiight…

Geez Whistler, how many computers do you need to wipe one by one? Learn to network.

I suspect the whole drugged-out interrogation scene was put in the movie to account for Snipes being stoned half the time. I mean, even before Dr. Vance injects him with the truth serum, he’s out of it.

“It’s the Endgame, Blade.” So that’s when he was up to when Thanos attacked…

Uh, you see that the people you’re trying to shoot are ducking, yet you keep firing like you’re the A-Team.

Wait, so Marvel Comics exists in the movie’s universe? So, I take it The Avengers are like some kind of historical accounts or something…

Why do they call Dracula “Drake” now, anyway? He’s only been awake from a short time, did they just make up a name for him on the spot?

Vampire vibrators. Now I’ve seen everything…

The fabled Apple product placement. I guess having her listen to music fleshes out her character a bit, but did we really need to see her making a playlist twice? Also, it isn’t very practical to limit one of your senses when you’re fighting a deadly enemy.

Okay, the scene with the processing plant is actually pretty creepy, and the way Blade dispatches the crooked FBI head who oversees it is neat. “You’ve got 20 seconds…” Guy runs away. “Twenty.” On the other hand, “Harvest” is pretty on the nose for a shutdown password, don’t you think?

Why did Drake use Whistler’s image to attack the Nightstalkers? It couldn’t be for psychological reasons, literally the only two people it would have affected on any level were out at the time. And for that matter, why disguise himself at all? He was only going to kill everybody anyway.

I will admit, the little vampire Pomeranian is kinda funny, as is King’s reaction to it.

A somewhat impressive moment of surprising turnabout is ruined by Triple H burping fire.

Triple H losing? In 2004? That’s how you know this is fictional.

The Movie Literally Opens With This. Consider It A Taste Of What’s To Come

And now, just for this review, a list of some of the Oscar-worthy lines of dialogue in the film, with a “*” signifying that said line was delivered by Ryan Reynolds, making things somewhat better. Also, I apologize in advance for the language here, I’m just quoting the movie.

“Not a Vampire, Dumb SH*T!”

“Rise and shine, Sleepyheeaaad!” Okay, it’s actually not that dumb on its own, but the stupid way the actor says it puts it on here.

Okay, this one’s not really dumb, but I thought it worth mentioning due to being quite evergreen: “Do you know who’s in the White House Right now?” “An asshole.”

“When you drink blood, do you feel yourself becoming, um, sexually aroused?” Right before implying that Blade sleeps with his mother. At least Blade has the decency to look at him weird afterwards.

“Don’t f*ck with my thing!”

Parker Posey whispering about how the vampires used the humans like pawns to get to Blade. You’re already in a soundproof room and the only people around are in on it. You just look silly.

“HANNIBAL KING!!!!”

Blade pretending to choke while talking to King.

“F*CKING HANNIBAL KING!”

“What’s wrong Half-Pint, you need a time out?” “Blow me.” That’s her brother.

“They pretty much f*cking ass-raped us!”

“And unlike typical vampires, her fangs are located in her vagina.”*

“What? You wanna kiss me, pretty boy?”

“You might want to consider blinking once in a while.”* Not really bad, just kind of funny when you remember the whole ordeal with Snipes not wanting to open his eyes for that one scene.

Well, that all depends, because clearly this dog has a bigger dick than you.”*

“And when the f*ck did you see my dick, F*ckface?” “I was talking to her!”*

“You’re tasting a little bland, lover. Are you getting enough fatty acids in your diet? Have you tried lake trout?”

“How about you take a sugar-frosted f*ck off the end of my dick?”*

“And how about everyone now say the word ‘dick’ anymore? It provokes my envy.” I just want to point out that the last five lines are a continuous exchange.

“Spit it out, you f*cking fruitcake!” Hey now, there’s no need for any homophobia here!

And now for the most famous line in the movie: “It’s being pumping through the building’s air conditioning system, you C*CK-JUGGLING THUNDERC*NT!”*

Blade Trinity is a mess, muddled by a weak script, multiple plotlines being thrown around in a jumbled manner, and trashy and awkward dialogue that tries way too hard half the time. Add in the fact that nobody in the cast enjoyed it and it showing like a sore thumb, plus the main actor no longer giving a crap (and not in the cool way he didn’t give a crap before) and you’ve got a textbook case of a third film that derailed the goodwill built up by the previous two installments. Sure, Hannibal King’s scenes are kind of fun in a “so bad it’s good way,” and Ryan Reynolds’s charm is the redeeming factor in that, but overall this was a tragic misfire that killed the franchise for a good 15 years before the MCU stepped in for a reboot. That, and Wesley Snipes going to prison for tax evasion not long after the movie came out, but that’s a whole other story…

This is where the movies end (for now. Make it rain, Cottonmouth), but I’m not done with the Daywalker just yet. I think we should end this month of reviews on a happier note, so next week I’m going to be doing one of Blade’s smaller screen appearances, one that actually pre-dates the first movie. I’m talking about his two-part turn in the classic Spider-Man: The Animated Series, where he and the Wall-crawler reluctantly joined forces to take on Morbious The Living Vampire. ‘Till then, I’ve been The Uncanny Fox. Live long, stay gold, remember: Never mess with Triple H’s dog. Chris Jericho learned that one the hard way.