The first-time director is John Moore, who has made lots of TV commercials, something we intuit in a scene where Reigart orders Burnett to proceed to another pickup area, and Burnett visualizes fast-motion whooshing tracking shots up and down mountains and through valleys before deciding, uh-uh, he ain’t gonna do that.
What Burnett does do is stroll through Bosnia like a bird-watcher, exposing himself in open areas and making himself a silhouette against the skyline. He’s only spotted in the first place because when his buddy is cornered, he’s hiding safely but utters a loud involuntary yell and then starts to run up an exposed hillside. First rule of not getting caught: No loud involuntary yells within the hearing of the enemy.
This guy is a piece of work. Consider the scene where Burnett substitutes uniforms with a Serbian fighter. He even wears a black ski mask covering his entire face. He walks past a truck of enemy troops, and then what does he do? Why, he removes the ski mask, revealing his distinctive blond hair, and then he turns back toward the truck so we can see his face, in case we didn’t know who he was. How did this guy get through combat training? Must have been a social promotion to keep him with his age group.
At times Burnett is pursued by the entire Serbian army, which fires at him with machine guns, rifles, and tanks, of course never hitting him. The movie recycles the old howler where hundreds of rounds of ammo miss the hero, but all he has to do is aim and fire, and—pow! another bad guy jerks back, dead. I smiled during the scene where Admiral Reigart is able to use heat-sensitive satellite imagery to look at high-res silhouettes of Burnett stretched out within feet of the enemy. Maybe this is possible. What I do not believe is that the enemies in this scene could not spot the American uniform in a pile of enemy corpses.
Do I need to tell you that the ending involves a montage of rueful grins, broad smiles, and meaningful little victorious nods, scored with upbeat rock music? No, probably not. And of course we get shots of the characters and are told what happened to them after the story was over—as if this is based on real events. It may have been inspired by the adventures of Air Force pilot Scott O’Grady, who was rescued after being shot down over Bosnia in 1995, but based on real life, it’s not.
Blade: Trinity
(DIRECTED BY DAVID GOYER; STARRING WESLEY SNIPES, KRIS KRISTOFFERSON; 2004)
I liked the first two Blade movies, although my description of Blade II as a “really rather brilliant vomitorium of viscera” might have sounded like faint praise. The second film was directed by Guillermo del Toro, a gifted horror director with a sure feel for quease inducing, and was even better, I thought, than the first. Now comes Blade: Trinity, which is a mess. It lacks the sharp narrative line and crisp comic-book clarity of the earlier films, and descends too easily into shapeless fight scenes that are chopped into so many cuts that they lack all form or rhythm.
The setup is a continuation of the earlier films. Vampires are waging a war to infect humanity, and the most potent fighter against them is the half-human, half-vampire Blade (Wesley Snipes). He has been raised from childhood by Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), who recognized his unique ability to move between two worlds, and is a fearsome warrior, but, despite some teammates, is seriously outnumbered.
As Trinity opens, the Vampire Nation and its leader, Danica (played by Parker Posey—yes, Parker Posey), convince the FBI that Blade is responsible for, if I heard correctly, 1,182 murders. “They’re waging a goddamned publicity campaign,” Whistler grumbles, in that great Kris Kristofferson seen-it-all voice.
Agents surround Blade headquarters, which is your basic action movie space combining the ambience of a warehouse with lots of catwalks and high places to fall from and stuff that blows up good. Whistler goes down fighting (although a shotgun seems retro given the sci-fi weapons elsewhere in the movie), and Blade is recruited by the Night Stalkers, who reach him through Whistler’s daughter, Abigail (Jessica Biel). It would have been too much, I suppose, to hope for Whistler’s mother.
The Night Stalkers have information that the Vampire Nation is seeking the original Dracula because, to spread the vampire virus, “they need better DNA; they need Dracula’s blood.” Dracula’s superior DNA means he can operate by day, unlike his descendants, who must operate by night. The notion that DNA degrades or is somehow diluted over the centuries flies in the face of what we know about the double helix, but who needs science when you know what’s right? “They found Dracula in Iraq about six months ago,” we learn, and if that’s not a straight line, I’m not Jon Stewart.
Dracula is some kinduva guy. Played by Dominic Purcell, he isn’t your usual vampire in evening dress with overdeveloped canines, but a creature whose DNA seems to have been infected with the virus of Hollywood monster effects. His mouth and lower face unfold into a series of ever more horrifying fangs and suchlike, until he looks like a mug shot of the original Alien. He doesn’t suck blood; he vacuums it.
Parker Posey is an actress I have always had affection for, and now it is mixed with increased admiration for the way she soldiers through an impossible role, sneering like the good sport she is. Jessica Biel becomes the first heroine of a vampire movie to listen to her iPod during slayings. That’s an excuse to get the sound track by Ramin Djawadi and RZA into the movie, I guess, although I hope she downloaded it from the iTunes Store and isn’t a pirate on top of being a vampire.
Vampires in this movie look about as easy to kill as the ghouls in Dawn of the Dead. They have a way of suddenly fizzing up into electric sparks, and then collapsing in a pile of ash. One of the weapons used against them by the Night Stalkers is a light-saber device that is, and I’m sure I have this right, “half as hot as the sun.” Switch on one of those babies and you’d zap not only the vampires but British Columbia and large parts of Alberta and Washington State.
Jessica Biel is the resident babe, wearing fetishistic costumes to match Blade’s, and teaming up with Hannibal King (Ryan Reynolds), no relation to Hannibal Lecter, a former vampire who has come over to the good side. The vampire killers and their fellow Night Stalkers engage in an increasingly murky series of battles with the vampires, leading you to ask this simple strategic question: Why, since the whole world is theirs for the taking, do the vampires have to turn up and fight the Night Stalkers in the first place? Why not just figure out that since the Stalkers are in Vancouver, the vampires should concentrate on, say, Montreal?
Boat Trip
(DIRECTED BY MORT NATHAN; STARRING CUBA GOODING JR, HORATIO SANZ; 2003)
Boat Trip arrives preceded by publicity saying many homosexuals have been outraged by the film. Now that it’s in theaters, everybody else has a chance to join them. Not that the film is outrageous. That would be asking too much. It is dimwitted, unfunny, too shallow to be offensive, and way too conventional to use all of those people standing around in the background wearing leather and chains and waiting hopefully for their cues. This is a movie made for nobody, about nothing.
The premise: Jerry (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is depressed after being dumped by his girl (Vivica A. Fox). His best buddy Nick (Horatio Sanz) cheers him up: They’ll take a cruise together. Nick has heard that the ships are jammed with lonely women. But they offend a travel agent, who books them on a cruise of gay men, ho ho.