Blade: Trinity (aka Blade III)

My wife loves vampire movies, so we eventually watch them all. (It dawned on me when thinking about this post that a lot of my girlfriends had a thing about vampires. I don't know if that says anything about me or not, but I think that's one avenue I'll leave unexplored.)

I settled in for Blade: Trinity expecting some stylistic hyper-gore and some good snipes from Wesley, uh, Snipes. (I hadn't put that together until just now. No kidding.) As a non-fan of swat-fu, I had also fired up the computer to rip (convert to MP3) a bunch of recent CD purchases (including the Alfie soundtrack), planning to dart away and start a new one when fists and ancient Japanese swords whose blades had been folded over 10,000 times during the smelting started flying. But, that's before I discovered that we were actually being treated to Blade: The Comedy.

I guess the presence of Parker Posey might have been a clue, but then she seems like the kind of girl that's always wanted to be in a vampire movie, regardless of what it was like. I didn't know Ryan Reynolds - the current king of wiseass asides, taking the crown from Bruce Willis - was in it, or that might have cinched it.

The reviews on Amazon fall cleanly on the two sides of the fence, dismay that it was funny and not an over-serious gore fest, and delight that it was funny and not an over-serious gore fest. (And they give out some major spoilers, so beware.) Obviously, I'm delighted.

The plot has the vampires resurrecting The Original Vampire (kinda borrowing a plot line from Anne Rice) in order to finally destroy Blade and his vampire-killer army. And ... that's about it.

The one surprise was how little Wesley, the series' star and producer, was actually on screen. Ryan Reynolds, playing Hannibal King (who's loosely patterned after Kurt Russell's great Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China), is actually the de facto star of the movie, along with the supporting roles, like Posey's and the guy who plays The Original Vampire, getting a lot of face time. This is almost unheard of in a major franchise with a major star. I don't know if this speaks to Wesley Snipes' lack of vanity or to his intelligence to get out of the way when they got a good thing going on, or both. Let's be generous and say both.

Those of you interested in a fang and a chuckle should pencil in Blade: The Comedy sometime soon.