Blade Trilogy - Which was the best of the three?
With three Blade movies firmly on the books, it's time to pick the best of the three.
With Blade Trinity on cable every hour on the hour, I felt it was time to reflect on the three Blade movies and try to decide which one was "the best". This proved to be a more challenging endeavor than I would have imagined.
First, we have the original. Who could forget the opening sequence with blood raining down from the ceilings in the vampire dance club. Enter Blade. How could you not love the image of him slinging his flying blade around the room and then catching it like a boomerang. It literally defined cool. We then launch into a typical origin story. In the midst of this story, we come across the actor who truly made the movie: Stephen Dorff. That's right, I said it, Stephen Dorff. Despite what some may think about him, there is no one else I could image playing Deacon Frost. He was cool, brash, and angry. Perfectly cast.
Next was Blade II. Here we of course had the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" story. Blade has to join forces with the one thing he hates more than anything in this world: vampires. He has to join up with them to take on a new parasitic breed of vampires that feeds on vampires themselves. These vampires had what was known as a "maw". Basically their entire jaw would open up and an Aliens-like tongue would shoot out to suck the vampire's blood. This was probably the darkest of the three films. There was this ever-present sense of doom in the movie. The one downfall in this flic is that they kind of overused the CGI. Right idea, wrong end effect.
Lastly, we have Blade Trinity. Despite the movie being on TV all the time, I can't help watching it every single time. It's like a trainwreck to me. It's an electronica-enduced popcorn vampire movie. Plus, as per usual, Ryan Reynolds comes in and absolutely steels the show (which of course pissed Wesley Snipes off to no end). He brought comic relief to a vampire movie and totally pulled it off. So yes, the movie was absolutely entertaining. However, was it enough to make it the best of the trilogy....
Sadly, no. The crown has to go to the original Blade movie. It's the movie that set the tone. The movie that established Wesley Snipes as very own character. In other words, when you think of Wesley Snipes, you think of Blade. The first movie had a great mix of character-development, action, and story. Without this movie and the success it brought, let's face it, the other two would have never seen the light of day. And let's not forget, they were pretty good too :)