Reviewed by John Barker © 2005
- Don't be deceived -- get out of cinema quick!

            Re-mythologizing the legend of the vampire has become an annual event in Hollywood with no fewer than four films centring upon the infamous Count Dracula released in the last four years. From Wes Craven’s sleep inducing Dracula 2000 to this years blood-drained Van Helsing, the Count has become a negligent nosferatu rather than the romantic anti-hero of Bram Stoker’s envisioning.

            It will therefore come as no surprise to viewers that the third and hopefully final film in the Blade series has taken liberties with the tale of Dracula, now modernised to be called Drake, and has none of the tongue-in-cheek flippancy that made the first two Daywalker outings enjoyable.

Switching from screenwriting duties to the director’s chair has obviously been a difficult job for David Goyer and raising the bar a third time is a near impossible task. It doesn’t help that he loads his script full of other people’s ideas; witness the opening car chase, which makes Blade look like a poor mans XXX caught in one of less kinetic action sequences from The Fast and the Furious. Add to this C.G.I bloodshed and Matrix style slow-motion shots, and this series has hit a dead end.

Even teen attractions like WWF wrestler Triple H and the rather sassy Jessica Biel can not draw the attention away from the predictability of the film as Blade suffers (much like Spiderman) from P.R problems. Blade has unfortunately murdered a few innocent humans and segments of the vampire community have used the media to frame him. Now before you ask, Alistair Cambell does not come to the rescue. Isolated from society and under attack from the federal authorities (also see Goyer’s X2) Blade must fight all-comers and stop the vampires from trying to conquer earth.   Just a normal night for Blade then, but its not all garlic-soaked cliché as Freudian psychoanalysis finds a place alongside all the wooden stakes and silver tipped weaponry. In one particularly surreal scene a vampire queen and Van Wilder’s  Ryan Reynolds discuss sexual confusion, penis envy, and there is even a sly reference to the vagina dentate. Social commentary also rears its ugly head in the form of a biological weapon, that will apparently turn most of America into plasma-pillagers, and the more cynical elements of the audience may consider this to be a better option than another four years of the Bush administration.

Political satire aside, the dialogue is just putrid; clangers like “Roll with me” and any number of impossibly bad stabs at colloquial street speak mean that the script is placed firmly in the linguistically challenged category. The need to be touch with popular culture also extends to Jessica Biel’s use of an iPod while fighting hordes of the un-dead. The album she plays is none other than ‘Kicking Ass Volume 2’. One can only wonder what was contained on Volume 1 of this anthology.