Blade: Trinity (2004)

 "Sooner or later, the thirst always wins."

So Blade is back. And now it's 2004, well into the era of Marvel superhero films that Blade pioneered. So what do we get for my most recent unwatched Marvel film?

But well, this is a very flawed film, if not an awful one. It tells us two things. Firstly, Wesley Snipes, while an effective '90s action film actor, is... well, washed up by this point. There's something very off about his performance.

Yet this is, perhaps, partly due to the lacklustre performances of everyone in this film. Kris Kristofferson is oddly wooden, too. Even Ryan Reynolds isn't firing on all cylinders. And, if the stars are beneath their usual standard, we must blame the director.

Interestingly, though, the script- by David S. Goyer- is perfectly good. It's just that it's badly directed- also by David S. Goyer. The man can write, as we've seen countless times. He just can't direct. He really can't. This is all very music video, something very popular at the time. Proper cinema it is not, despite the many well-conceived fight scenes.

And that's interesting, isn't it? The script is perfectly good. The concept is epic, Blade versus Dracula (whose Sumerian origin here is weird, like Vlad Dracul never existed), with a rather fun Hannibal King, Jessica Biel as a somewhat cool kind of female Hawkeye, and lots of well-written fight scenes thsat sort of fail in the execution and- especially- the cinematography. A good script, sadly, doth not equal a good film.

Blade (1998)

“You may wake up one day and find yourself extinct."

 It's strange to think that this is such an early Marvel film. In fact, prior to this the only feature films had been the bizarrely underrated Howard the Duck, The Punisher and the low budget, no star straight-to-video '90s films Captain America and Fantastic Four, both rather obscure. And that was it. Until Blade came along, failed to wow the critics but was a huge success. Not long after came X-Men and Marvel films were everywhere, many of them sadly at Fox.

So how does it stand up, twenty years on? Pretty well, actually. Yes, wooden Wesley Snipes is phoning it in with a character that could have offered a lot of potential to a good actor, and has no charisma. Yet the script- by no less than David S. Goyer- is superb, and the film looks great, even if the cinematography has inevitably dated; from the perspective of 2018 there's more than a little of the late '90s music video vibe. It looks great, though, with impressive CGI.

We begin with a great set piece at a vampire rave that dates the film enormously, yes, but also shows us what Blade can do and his mission in a visually exciting way. N'Bushe Wright convinces as the doctor who is unwittingly drawn into this vampire fighting world, and Kris Kristofferson is superb as the grizzly and gnarled mentor figure.

This is not like the comics; Blade has been made into a kind of half-vampire for some reason, and the vampire mythos here is not quite the same, but it's nice to see Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan being credited.It's an entertaining two hours, though, and perhaps the real start of our current Marvel cinematic age.