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.