Blade Trinity

Blade rides on the good ole theme we never grow tired of - Good vs Evil. But it warrants a different reading. Blade is both a vampire and a human, and he drifts between the human world and the vampire world. Being both at once makes him neither of them. He is a stain in the picture, and it's that very stain that maintains the balance and wholeness of the world. That's the charm of Blade and what makes the first two Blade movies successful.

Sadly, the franchise is fucked in Blade Trinity, to put it mildly. No wonder they have to end it. David Goyer said in the making-of special feature on the DVD that Blade was pitched to the studio as a three-part project which is nothing but bullshit. These days, if a studio or a filmmaker wants to milk a franchise for more bucks, they said all the sequels were meant to be in the first place. And speaking of sequels, I rather appreciate Dimension's honesty in that Final Destination 3 and Scary Movie 4 weren't planned from the get-go, they're just good business!

First the good thing, Jessica Biel is a hottie.

Now on to the bad. David Goyer is so full of shit when he talks about his vision for Blade Trinity, when there obviously is none! Dracula again, you heard me, Dracula! Bram Stoker's Dracula! It's fine if you can add some real twists to this all-too-familiar character (like Elias Merhige's brilliant Shadow of the Vampire which gives Nosferatu a whole new spin) , but a Dracula who talks about honor and knightship is just lame! Vampire as a mirror of human being and their paradoxical nature so well illustrated in the previous two films are ditched in favour of Alien-like monster kill-fest! Goyer even lets a smug psychologist theorize vampirism in the most trite terms at the beginning of the movie so as to discredit any inquiry into vampiric culture, and basically sets the stage for all out bravura and brawn. This is fine, too, if you can make the action right. But Goyer screws it up again! The chase sequences between Dracula and Blade feel like scenes stolen from NYPD Blues (Why does Dracula have to flee from Blade if he's so legendarily strong and invincible?! And why does the vampire king have to hold a baby hostage?!) and the final duel between them is a complete yawn. To rub salt to the wound, Goyer puts in a clown with a silly name: Hannibal King. What kind of handle is that?! Amidst all the ass-kicking and moral ambiguity promised by the Blade franchise, why do we need comic relief and recycled-trillion-time one-liners?

Moral of the story: Writers and directors are not interchangeable. They're two different species! A writer may dream up a lot of things in his mind, but the transformation to the silver screen through a myriad of lens require a completely different sort of mindset, one that can weave ideas into real images under the guidance of a singular vision (I mean what kind of vampire killer would need to listen to her iPod when she laid waste to the undead, huh?). The screenplay of the first two Blade movies are some of Goyer's best works - I'll give him that. And I look forward to seeing his treatment of Batman in Batman Begins (directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale, a must-see).