Through its original trilogy, the Blade movies got shorter and their credits got longer. Here, I can quantify this:
Blade (IMDB rating 7)
1:55:13 - 2:00:15 credits begin to end
II (IMDB rating 6.6)
1:49:13 - 1:56:50 credits begin to end
Trinity (IMDB rating 5.
1:44:26 credits begin
1:52:33 to 1:52:52 car shot + new line cinema logo
The IMDB ratings actually seem to better track a credits / running time penalty modifier better than they do the films' actual merits. The original deserves somewhat higher than a 7, I'd guess, and I felt that II was the weakest of the bunch by a margin. III was a mess but it still managed to be mostly enjoyable and coherent.
A couple observations:
Blade is a classic in most ways. It has decent pacing through most of its length and the cast seems to fit. There are plenty of cheesy moments but CG doesn't take over most of the film. One thing that did stick out was the driver's license for Blade's mother: The photo was in color, instead of the more likely black and white (at least in the early 1970s, at least some US passports used a black and white photo still). A quick look on Google does find a plausible-looking 1977 color photo for Alfred Hitchcock (!) though. Actually, you can probably second-guess whether a driver's license would have been common for a young black woman at all in Florida at that time, or traditional blue shoulder insignia for ambulance drivers (not EMTs). A good portion of the basic plotline seems to have been recycled for the otherwise quite original and entertaining Sony Pictures flick Underworld from 2003, whose sequels hold a different trajectory for quality. I didn't feel depressed while watching Blade's sequels, but nevertheless I did realize soon after that it is all downhill from here. Still, if you enjoy the basic premise of Wesley Snipes sometimes kicking ass, there's nothing too much to regret in pressing on to the sequels.
Blade II loses Blade's distinctive .45 Mac-11 pistol and begins a tradition of fucking around with Kristofferson's Whistler character. After an intro that looked pretty promising for continuing the atmosphere of the first film (watch the Moscow scene and then the Serbia intro scene of this film), it quickly started to feel like an episode of a television series, particularly in its heavy use of body horror props. The autopsy scene, for example, looked straight out of one of those crime lab TV series, except with more Ecto Cooler green. I think I lost it totally with the "Blood Pack" crew, a bunch of ciphers in make-up (although I almost wanted to like Ron Perlman's Reinhardt character, even he managed to feel strongly like a nobody. The "Priest" character I recognized but couldn't place; turned out he played Vincent Van Gogh on an episode of Dr. Who, one of the couple shows I've seen out of all of the modern series. Donnie Yen painted up like some kind of egyptian / whore and randomly kicking at enemies was about the low point of the movie for me; these guys had no purpose other than to taunt Blade and get chewed into kibbles (or turned) later. Snipes' CG stunt double seems to get an obnoxious amount of screen time in this one, another low point. Like the Blood Pack, the "bad guys" are distinctive in their own ways (particularly the Big Bad) but not enough to care. There is also a pretty half-assed attempt to make us care about the revenge story that, like most everything and everyone in the rest of the movie, doesn't stick. They even manage to fuck with the partnership idea here, so count out another obnoxious character from the get-go!
Blade: Trinity (with the Theatrical ending - I haven't seen the others) leaves you with absolutely no clue about what constitutes a trinity or why it matters (up until perhaps the very end of the film, where you might guess at a possible trinity, but won't care). It comes back from the brink of television movie-dom but introduces plenty of new annoying quirks of its own, and fails to ditch the obnoxious distracting CG abuse from Blade II (nothing quite as spectacularly ridiculous as an elbow drop off the top of a huge column, but there are some sequences near the end that are very close to matching it). Instead of a rag-tag band of wannabe Blade hunting vampires, we get a rag-tag band of wannabe vampire killers, and (with only one real exception) they see even less success than the Blood Pack from Blade II. I don't even want to say anything because of how ridiculous the stereotypes are and I don't want to feel contaminated. The two important characters of this bunch (aside from Zoey, or "Zoe," in the credits, I guess) are Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel. Biel's character shows up early on, wastes four vampires with a convincing enough bag lady routine, and then we don't see anything more of her for probably half an hour. Reynolds and the other take longer to show up. Reynolds seemingly spends most of his time yelling about sugar and sugary cereals, or yelling about dick (he and one vampire lady in particular have a hell of a history, apparently; I agreed with her completely when she asked for a consensus that nobody in the room use the word again). He does have what is probably the greatest scene from the film, though, when he fights three dogs. Well, "fighting" isn't the right word here. Not exactly the biggest tough guy of the bunch, so he veers between mostly useless comedy relief and thinking about being an action hero.
Biel's character, Abigail of [blank], was also quite infuriating to watch at times. What should have been somewhat enjoyable split-screen montages of ass-kicking were marred not only by substandard-seeming fight choreography but also by the gimmick of her loading up her iTunes beforehand, so I was more or less in shock through the beginning of the intro scenes. Ryan Reynolds making a comment about "what the kids listen to these days" doesn't help. Actually, I guess that means they used this dumb, stupid gimmick three times. Ouch. Kristofferson's Whistler would have put this nicely: The vampires already can see in the dark and I can't, and now I'm supposed to willingly give up my other reliable sense too?
The FBI also shows up early on and gets nothing done other than fail to assert jurisdiction, and then is seen again for virtually the whole movie. I was expecting they'd at least make some kind of Die Hard-like use of the two Agents; they get spared, but the movie does not. Bullet-point rundowns and advertising copy of the film typically mentions something to the effect that Blade is now on the wrong side of the law. Super edgy: Does that mean all the federal firearms violations from the other films were freebies? This was actually on my mind while watching the first films, but I didn't expect it to be approached so crudely - it's not Batman so I suppose not having to face the implications of vigilantism dead-on was weakening the scripter's resolve here. The original Blade sets up a sort of plausible relationship between Blade and the police (namely, Blade stays away and only dumb human servants of vampires are stupid enough to use the badge to fuck with him), so you'd think that it had to be broken for a good reason. No such luck here.
When your film is nearly two hours long, how long can you leave plot threads dangling without payoff, before the audience forgets or fails to care? I didn't have any clue what the FBI were doing at the end until later, and their sudden appearance seemed anything but likely. I also didn't give a damn by that point.
After Underworld from 2003 borrowed the idea of ultraviolet weapons (the UV work lamp from the original, and UV headlights and "grenades" in part II), Blade III seems to finally catch up by borrowing UV bullets in turn (which ironically play almost no role in the series). Also, Triple H's character seems pretty much identical with all the other shit-eating oversized white blonde heavies in this franchise. Just sayin'. Nice wrestling moves though. Actually, a bit of reading revealed that a third "vampire extinction except for Blade, but wait there's werewolves" ending was rejected...due in part to the similarity with the Underworld series.
Incubus, the William Shatner flick from 1966 shown in a few scenes, has an interesting (or jarring) history all its own, including the murder-suicide of its title role's actor before the film's release, a period as a "lost film" up until 2001, and other effects of a so-called "curse" on members of its cast and production. The production firm was called Daystar, and this film makes a reference to that, calling a MacGuffin weapon for the final battle the "Daystar [blank]." Apparently there was a clip of Blackula playing somewhere, probably in the Dracula themed shop, but I don't recall it. By a strange coincidence, I heard a bit of the film's dialogue recently on the radio in a segment about Esperanto, the language it was filmed in.
Best scenes:
Blade: "Wait! I owe you, man! I got two new hands, Blade, and I don't know which one to use to kill you with!"
Blade II: Any scene with Kris Kristofferson looking smugly at shit-eating vampires
Blade: Trinity: All the pomeranian's scenes, especially his expression at 1:30:50, 1:30:58, and 1:31:06
Probable loose ends:
Blade: Curtis Webb ("Tell me, Karen, do you ever have second thoughts about us?")
Blade II: "You don't think I forgot about you, did you?" No loose ends.
Blade: Trinity: The dogs. Also, the alternate endings leave some other potential loose ends open to interpretation.
Overall series verdict:
Missed opportunity. Maybe that can be remedied by a timely post from GaijinPunch!
