By Ned Jordan
BloodRayne: The Third Reich finally brings the series into the same
timeframe as the video games it's based on. Yes, BloodRayne fans, you finally
get to see the half-human/half-vampire Dhampir Rayne take on Nazis. Too bad it
wasn't worth the wait.
The movie opens with Rayne (Natassia Malthe) acting as a one-woman liberation
army, taking on the Nazi War Machine to free Jews headed to concentration camps.
During one of her raids on a train, she encounters the local resistance fighters
led by Nathaniel (Brendan Fletcher) who are also raiding the train. In the
confusion of battle, Rayne manages to corner the local Nazi commander Ekart
Brand (Michael Par') and slay him, but accidentally turns him into a Dhampir in
the process. Brand becomes determined to create an army of Nazi vampire soldiers
and turn the Fuhrer himself into an immortal Dhampir, and Rayne teams up with
Nathaniel to stop him.
The movie's opening scene sets the tone for the entire movie, and serves as a
warning to cut your losses and move on to some other source of entertainment.
Rayne looks like she shops at the Budapest Hot Topic (fifty years or so before
it opens), Nathaniel and his resistance fighters look like they'd be more at
home at a Venice Beach skate park, and everyone in the film speaks in an
American accent and overuses 21st Century colloquialisms. The fight choreography
is terrible and Malthe looks slightly less dangerous with a blade than Hello
Kitty would while wielding a butter knife. After a bunch of shooting and amateur
blade work the Nazis are beaten, at which point Nathaniel throws open the doors
of a boxcar and then throws a hissy fit when he finds it packed with Jewish
prisoners rather than the weapons he was expecting. Wow. Incongruous reactions
aside, that's the last you'll see of the Jews and that particular narrative
thread. And that's the way the rest of the film goes ' terribly staged gunfights
and laughable swordplay interspersed with filler scenes that don't really go
anywhere nor have much to do with the already threadbare plot. Bad acting, bad
story, bad cinematography, bad, bad, bad.
There's not much in the way of special features here. A commentary track on
which director Uwe Boll makes it seem like he actually believes that he does
good work, and a 'making of' featurette in which Boll takes pride in his track
record of delivering films on time and under budget (probably mostly due to the
fact that he doesn't seem to ever bother with a second take) and some of the
actors discuss their experience making the film and working with Boll. The only
thing mildly entertaining in the whole thing is Brendan Fletcher's commentary,
as he makes it pretty clear that he doesn't harbor any illusions about the
quality of the production.
Final Rating:
