I had high hopes since this was directed by Guillermo del Toro, the guy who made the high-class Mexican horror film Cronos, which achieved what now seems impossible: a wholly original take on vampirism (something that Blade definitely isn't).  Many have said that this sequel is better than the first Blade.  Alas, it is not.  For one thing, there's too much reuse of story bits familiar from the first film.  And one or two of the fight scenes are shoehorned in with only the skimpiest plot justification -- i.e. somebody saying "We came here to talk, not to fight!" five minutes later than they should have.

The character of Blade, as played by Snipes, is now one of the most one-dimensional roles in comic book films... they carried it off in the first film, with enough subtlety and suggestion of greater depths so that the character felt more like a complete person who was just showing a one-dimensional exterior.  Not here.  Blade has no discernible personality other than tough-guy-ness.  And Snipes' acting, I'm afraid, gets most of the blame.

The Hong Kong style action is now augmented by an additional fighting style in some of the later scenes: professional wrestling moves.  These are augmented by CGI, to show things like characters leaping up twenty feet to drop elbow-first onto an opponent.  Unfortunately you can always see the difference between which bits of action are CGI and which are flesh-and-bone actors.  As I've mentioned elsewhere, it's the way people move that is hardest to capture realistically in CGI.  Some other CGI effects, such as dead vampires disintegrating into burning ash, come off quite well.  And there are some pretty good traditional rubber effects, such as the grotesque mouthparts of the super-vampires that are feeding on the normal vampires.

Yeah, super-vampires.  The plot is that the regular vampires form an alliance with Blade to fight these new critters.  And though the story is nothing revolutionary, it is something other than a standard action-movie plot, and del Toro does deserve a lot of credit on one point: he dares to strip vampirism completely of all the pseudo-erotic bullshit that everybody else keeps trying to pile on top of it.  From F.W. Murnau to the successors of Anne Rice, everyone has tended to keep making the vampiric bond more and more sexualized, until we're all sick to death of the sleazy pretentiousness of the subject, but del Toro's super-vampire is nothing but a humanized leech, an object of pure unambiguous revulsion.

All in all, what we've got pretty much resembles an exceptionally bloody and humorless episode of Buffy, with an R rating.  But that in itself is not such a bad thing...

A bigger budget for the series now... particularly, a much bigger advertising budget.  But the increased funds do show on screen: the special effects are pretty much flawless this time.  They even achieve the Holy Grail of wire-work: making the effect of people being knocked through the air for great distances look correctly timed instead of full of lame hesitations and buoyant hovering.

And they do very well at giving both the hero and the villain a powerful aura of menace and dangerousness.  This may sound like a small thing, but it's something that action movies of this sort can live or die by.  When an action movie turns laughable, it's usually because they tried and failed in this area.

But, how good a movie is this sequel?  Well, when it was done Wesley Snipes sued the studio!  (Not that he's on very high ground himself, with most of his action scenes apparently performed by a stunt double.)  And critical reviews have been mainly negative, saying this is the comic-bookiest of the three Blade movies.

I was surprised, therefore, to find -- and it saddens me, as an admirer of Guillermo Del Toro, to say this -- that Blade: Trinity is in many ways superior to Blade II.  Why?  Because the characters are less one-dimensional and the story shows more sides of them, and because the action is solider, has far fewer corny moves, and is far less driven by contrived excuses (despite which, there sure is plenty of it), and because there is something faintly resembling drama at times, rather than just action and plot-machinery.

That said, it must be admitted that the plot is much less original.  It concerns the reawakening of the original ancestral progenitor of the vampires, sometimes called Dracula.  They incorporate Del Toro's super-vampires here, by making the original Dracula have super-vampire mouthparts.  They show the vampires doing genetic experiments aimed at reintroducing super-vampire traits.  At first the regular vampires only wanted to kill the supers; now they see the original vampire as their savior, the one who can (a) revitalize their race, and (b) finally kill Blade.

The movie's greatest weakness is probably the gang of annoying sidekicks that Blade ends up stuck with, particularly Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel as a couple of martial arts weenies who are so tough that they can almost handle a vampire in unarmed combat.  The vampires' super strength tends to conveniently disappear when these two fight them.  According to Snipes, the film was intended to set up these two with their own series of spinoff movies.  Ain't gonna happen, they were too lame.

Oddly, in this movie Blade never once cuts anyone with the sword from which he takes his nom de guerre.  He wields it only in the final showdown with Dracula, and then never gets through the guy's guard with it!  Way to go, dorks.

The "Extended" cut in the unrated DVD edition has a different ending from the theatrical cut -- a better one.  The theatrical ending did not make any sense, actually.  The extended one, on the other hand, leaves you with a nice taste of doubt as to whether Blade is still on the side of the good guys.