Review of Blade: Trinity (2004) by Hugh N — 07 Nov 2018

This movie is terrible. This movie should have at least a 28% RT audience score. The first two Blade movies were great and underrated, but this one just plain sucked. The movie should have just focused on the titular character, Blade, instead of the two other characters, Hannibal King and Abigail Whistler. It should have just been titled "Blade III" instead of "Blade: Trinity". This movie felt more like a Nightstalkers team-up movie than a Blade solo film. The movie spends too much time focusing on the two uninteresting characters Hannibal and Abigail that they sort of overshadowed Blade in this movie. The last two Blade movies were fun, dark, serious, and rewatchable, but this one is just boring, bland, bleak, and disappointing. Wesley Snipes even looked bored throughout most of this film (not that I blame him). This should have a much lower audience score than 59%. Blade: Trinity deserves to at least have a 28% audience score. The plot is bad. The villain is awful and Dominic Purcell is terribly miscast in the role. There are too many quick cuts during action sequences that it even makes it hard to enjoy the action. The dialogue is bad. The writing is god-awful and the directing is amateurish. The character development is lacking. In the first act of the movie, Abraham Whistler gets killed off in a poorly executed way. Then there's a human who disguised himself as a vampire by wearing fake vampire teeth and Blade kills him mistaking him for a vampire, it was actually all just a trap for Blade. The guy with the fake vampire teeth was all in it. First of all, why would someone be stupid enough to want to get themselves killed just so that person that kills them gets arrested for murder? That's just stupid, terrible writing. It's so unrealistic. Then Blade gets arrested by the FBI. Turns out the FBI are actually all vampires. When he's still sitting in the chair all tied up, Hannibal comes to kill the vampires and save Blade. He wears a name tag that says "HELLO MY NAME IS FUCK YOU" which is just plain dumb and feels out of place for a Blade movie. Ryan Reynolds is a wonderful actor, but he is miscast as Hannibal King. Then later during the prison break-out scene, Abigail Whistler shows up to help them kill the FBI vampires and helps them escape. The action has so many quick cuts that it gets annoying and makes it hard to enjoy watching it. Then the three of them escape from that place and go take off inside a truck. When they were in the truck, it's revealed that Abigail is Abraham's daughter who oddly never even got mentioned even once in any of the previous films. Later we see Hannibal and Abigail take Blade to their hideout. We see Patton Oswalt's character who is basically the expert on the weapons. Before Hannibal explains to Blade the backstory of Dracula or as they mostly refer to him in this movie as "Drake" for short, he gives him a Marvel comic book called "The Tomb of Dracula". So yeah, he basically broke the fourth wall by doing that. Blade responds by throwing the comic book away and saying "You gotta be kidding me" to Hannibal. The humor may be sort of somewhat amusing, but it's out-of-place in a Blade movie and just doesn't seem to fit in and it feels somewhat forced. After he finished explaining the backstory of Drake, we see Drake walking in slow motion in the streets of New York City like a mafia boss instead of how the real Dracula would walk. He then enters into a store full of so much countless Dracula merchandise for sale which makes him feel so disrespected because of how much it probably makes him feel like nothing more than an icon. So he attacks, bites, and sucks the blood of the two mongers in the store. The scene is so dumb. We later see Blade, Hannibal, and Abigail all sitting in a truck together. In that scene, Hannibal explains to Blade that she needs to put her earphones while listening to music so it can make her concentrate better in fighting and killing vampires which doesn't make sense at all. What happens if a vampire sneaks up behind you while listening to music while wearing earbuds and you can't hear that vampire sneaking up on you? You see my point? This movie is so dumb and the writing is so terrible. Then after that there's a generic action montage of the three of them killing vampires. Then they interrogate this one guy and makes him tell them where Drake is. Then they go to this hotel and kill all the vampire goons there and they find Drake on the top floor. He jumps out the window to escape from them. Blade jumps out the window to chase him. Then there's a chase scene that seems silly and sort of goes on for too long. Drake eventually kidnaps a baby on the way while being chased by Blade. He explains to Blade what his endgame is on a roof after they stop running and throws the baby high in the air and escapes. Blade catches the baby. Later when the three of them go back to their hideout Hannibal is all badly hurt from Drake. Blade stares at him like he ruined their mission and then walks away. Hannibal asks Abigail, "he hates me, doesn't he"? Abigail replied "yeah" to him. Then Blade and Abigail without Hannibal go to some factory where they transform humans into vampires or something like that. After that, Hannibal gets kidnapped by Drake who shapeshifted as Abraham Whistler. Mistaking him for the real Abraham Whistler he says to him "dude...you're dead". Then Drake's vampires kill Abigail's blind mother and kidnaps her sister. I hate how they tried to make it seem all scary like a horror movie when one of them tried to stealthily assassinate Abigail's mom. It was just stupid, annoying and took too long. They waited so long for the jump scare to the point where it just got annoying and not scary. When Blade and Abigail return to the hideout, they discover that their hideout got discovered by Drake. She sees her mother's dead corpse on the ground. She cries and mourns for her. Blade just blatantly says "use it" to her and keeps blatantly just saying "use it". He most likely meant for her to use all of her anger and emotion against the ones who murdered her mother, but the writing was so bad and lazy that he just says "use it" instead. That dialogue was wooden and unnatural. So Hannibal gets the living crap beat out of him by the vampires when they were physically interrogating him. He calls this female vampire "thundercunt" which is just cheesy dialogue, but at least Ryan Reynolds pulls it off well and makes the scene at least somewhat bearable because he is a great actor. There were even vampire dogs in there which was just cheesy and dumb. So Blade and Abigail finally come there to rescue Hannibal and kill the vampires and Drake. Blade just leaves him handcuffed to the ground. Abigail frees him. There was at least one legitimately cool action scene where Blade all by himself alone kills the vampires like a badass without the annoying quick cuts. The fight with Ryan Reynolds and Triple Threat was so poorly choreographed that it barely looked like they were trying. The final battle between Blade and Drake had too many annoying quick cuts and bad editing that it ruined the action and killed the impact of the final battle scene. The screen transitions were so annoying. It kept cutting back and fourth to Blade fighting Drake then to Hannibal fighting Triple Threat's character, and to Abigail fighting vampires that it ruined the third and final act. The editing was so choppy. Drake gets defeated too easily by Blade and his defeat was poorly executed. A very disappointing end to the Blade Trilogy. Blade: Trinity unfortunately suffered from Threequelitis.

Rating: 2.5/10.