In the third film in the TV adventure serious Flynn has had enough and is near nervous breakdown. His girlfriend has left him and he’s just generally on edge, so gets some vacation time. After having a strange dream he heads to New Orleans on vacation and ends up embroiled in the hunt for another mythical artefact. Some people just can’t get a break from work. Ask Jessica Fletcher.
You’d think it would be a case of diminishing returns but that’s not…uh the case. Bad sentence that. This is actually an improvement on the second and possibly the first film.
Instead of the globe hoping adventure of King Solomon the action takes us to the Big Easy and that’s it. Ordinarily this would mean a whole butt load of voodoo and nothing much else. Refreshingly there’s only a tiny touch of voodoo, and even that barely impacts on the story. What we have here is a vampire story.
Classic vampires too. Scared of crosses, staked by Aspen, came from Judas. The bad guys of the film are a group of Russians who want the good old cold war days back and plan to resurrect ol’ Vlad the Impaler to help them do it. The Judas Chalice is the vampire version of the Holy Grail so Flynn has to beat them to it. Strangely enough, with the help of a vampire.
And it’s a good vampire movie. A PG one sure, but with well rounded characters that stick to the mythos that they set up.
This is aided by having a damned fine side cast. The love interest/assistant of this movie is played ably by Stana Katic, the female lead from Castle. A very good actress. Bruce Davison (senator Kelly in the X-Men films, one of the best bits of the recent Knight Rider series and a whole lot of other stuff) has an important supporting role that I won’t go in to too much. Both have surprisingly non-cheesy accents.
The Russian bad guys are pretty generic Russian bad guys, but not in a terrible way. And a stand out is Flynn’s guide who unfortunately I can’t find on IMDB. He’s a happy Creole taxi driver who has a million “cousins” who can help out with pretty much anything you could want or need. A little light comic relief and Nawlins flavour.
Flynn himself is a bit like Peter Parker when he doesn’t want to be Spider-Man here. He’s sick of the library and being a librarian, but finds his purpose again and cheers up. He’s not as mopey as I’m making him sound, but there are some actual genuine tender moments here.
Some good holiday weekend entertainment then. I don’t know if you’d HAVE to see the first two, but they expand on the established universe a bit too and I doubt you’d be lost.
Next up: (God help me) Pink Panther 2. The Steve Martin one. Merde.
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