Yes, but what of the future

Blade: Trinity is a plotless setpiece for gadgets, vampires, impossible martial arts, transitioning WWE wrestlers, absurd weapons, absurder clothing, intrusive product placement and Ryan Reynolds' tired-ass schtick delivery. Truly the William Shatner of Sean William Scott impersonators, each line Reynolds speaks is an inexplicably wrong-accented: "Could I be any . . . more . . . sarcastic?" He's bulked up a bit since Two Guys a Girl and a Pizza Place, but his open mic night acting remains bony and undernourished. Bad acting yes, and equally bad writing by David Goyer. Together Reynolds and Goyer serve up a comic relief holocaust not seen since the Lucas/Jar Jar scorched-earth campaign took my childhood and fed it to me on a plate of broken dreams with a fork of betrayed trust.

Have you guessed that this is going to be a positive review yet? . . . I said gadgets, vampires and impossible martial arts right? Oh, and Parker Posey. Even as a vampire, she purty.

Most serious actors, the kind of actors that do a lot of indie flicks for not a lot of money--people like Parker Posey--might feel self-conscious playing a vampire in a really crappy big-budget shlock-fest like this. I mean, when you make a movie with Christopher Guest and he asks you back a second time, you have to think you're above vampire flicks. If nothing else, she must have wondered what will her clove-cigarette-smoking dildo boyfriend Ryan Adams would say.

To her credit and caution to the wind, she attacks the role, playing her schizoid couture vamp with abandon. It's really a pretty funny, gutsy performance.

Further adding to Trinity's pedigree, it's got the Rza on beats. He has a lot of experience with music as it relates to the three key elements of the Blade mythos: martial arts, superheros, and evil incarnate. He founded the Wu-Tang after watching thousands of samurai movies, eventually scoring Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai and Kill Bill. His solo albums revolve around a superhero: Bobby Digital. His side project Gravediggaz, with Prince Paul of A Tribe Called Quest, is preoccupied with describing it with sanguine detail the many ways you can kill a person.

It fits then, when his talking-with-mouth-full delivery lays down the ending track after an hour and 40 some odd minutes of vampire killing. Also, someone in the laundry list of generic iPod whoring DJs lined up for this soundtrack decided to sample Velvet Underground's Venus in Furs; then Goyer had the frame of mind to put it in the scene where Dracula crashes an S&M Boutique and finds his visage on a vibrator.

The movie really makes no sense at all, it's unconnected, anecdotal and that's fine because the more sense a movie makes, the less vampires get killed. This inverse proportionality is practically a law of filmmaking. Lost Boys had the two Coreys and a greased up man in fluorescent spandex playing a baritone sax. Tons of blood suckers died in that. However, Nosferatu made tons of sense, vampire death count: 1. Same with Dracula.

Though this Dracula [Dominic Purcell] sucks and the end fight is really bad, it just continues the pattern of setting up inconceivable odds against Blade making it to a final confrontation, only to give him a less than worthy adversary. In the first it was Steven Dorff, a human male so small I could fold him into the palm of my hand. Whitney told me once that she thinks I might be the only person in the world she could beat up. After watching the first Blade, I think there might be a second.

And therein lies the strange continuity the films share: a reassuringly steady rate of decline.

Ben noted also that everytime Blade is outside in the daylight with an adversary--once in each movie he thinks--Blade gets a baby thrown at him. Reduntant? Splendid. Resplendent.

It's the worst of the series by far, but that's fine. The only thing really lacking was a good one liner. Goyer kind of screwed himself in the first script when he unwittingly penned a line so magnificent the one-liner universe folded in on itself and from the remnants emerged a new godhead:

Some motherfuckers are always trying to iceskate uphill.

So much truth in so few words.

Trinity does, however, lead me to seriously wonder about the fate of a franchise much nearer and dearer to my heart. This David S Goyer was in charge of providing Christopher Nolan with the script that would effectively reboot Batman, starting at the beginning.

And after quilling Batman Begins, he wrote and directed this. Thus I worry.