Blade: Trinity completes the Blade trilogy in cinematic grandeur, and brings about Dracula, an inevitable source in almost every Vampire franchise ever conceived of.
It was refreshing to have the "Elder" ruling-class/vampire-nation-lord/shadow-council thing dropped, since they were in both Blade and Blade II, and in both movies they were completely killed off, and ignored the existence of each other. Instead we have a group of happy-go-lucky vamps, who have one way or another made a mark in the world. You never find out how they managed to buy a skyscraper and a museum's worth of ancient art, but I'd imagine they had quite a lot of time to get their finances in order.
Anyway, deal is these vamps, right? Danica Talos (Posey "Queen of the Indies" Parker; Scream 3, A Mighty Wind), her brother Asher Talos (Callum Keith Rennie; Case 39, The X-Files: I Want To Believe), Jarko Grimwood (wrestler Paul "Triple H" Levesque), and their offsider vampires go to Syria in order to dig up the slumbering Dracula (Dominic Purcell; Straw Dogs, Blood Creek)... Or Drake... Or Dagon... They keep changing their mind. Anyway, after Dracula kills a bunch of them, he eventually agrees to join the team after he hears about the defender of humanity Blade (Wesley Snipes; New Jack City, Chaos) whom he believes may be a worthy adversary. Blade in turn gets together with the vampire hunting cell called "Nightstalkers", led by Abigail Whistler (Jessica Biel; the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Cellular) and Hannibal King (Ryan Reynolds; Waiting..., Buried) and together they continue the war for humankind.
With me so far? No? Well you should be, because this plot is about as run of the mill as they get. While I'm on that, it's worth pointing out that where Blade's saving grace was this awesome mythos and story, and totally failed at character-ing, Blade: Trinity had fantastically written characters, in a sort of non-event storyline. Where Blade II blended them, making it the best in the series. Trinity was okay, but it lacked a lot of the engaging elements from the previous two films.
I think in part this is because the film is meant to sort of cater to the cinema audience. After the success of Blade II, it's like they knew that people were going to go to the theatre for Trinity so they tailored the film accordingly. You know, just little things, cheesy lines come across in a way more badass way on the big screen. Montages can get tedious on the computer, but can often blow you away in theatres. Explosions and action and CG backflips always translate better in cinema than on DVD. Unfortunately, I own the DVD, not a cinema. Maybe the goddamn vampire pomeranian they threw in would've seemed less ridiculous if I'd seen Trinity when it came out in theatres, but I doubt it.
I'd like to bring up the issue of names. Not that people have unbelievably crazy names in these films, it's the' Super Hero genre after all, of course they've got stupid names! I love it! But the Blade series seems to be populated entirely by characters with the "Saying Names" fetish. It's all "Hannibal King! Die", "Blade! There you are", "Whistler! Come save us." "Drake! It's him" and gets pretty unbelievably dramatic rather swiftly.
It'll be interesting to see how Ryan Reynolds fairs. This Marvel film came out quite a while ago, since then he's played Wade Wilson in Origins: Wolverine, Green Lantern for DC Films, he was the protagonist in R.I.P.D. He's set to return to the X-Men universe for Deadpool. I suppose if Chris Evans can get away with playing The Human Torch in Fantastic 4 and Rise of the Silver Surfer then move on to playing Captain America in The First Avenger I don't see why Reynolds can't pull it off. Hannibal was great, Ryan Reynolds is great but I'd be fine to see this be the end of it all here.
-Gimly
