Twelve years after the disaster of Howard the Duck came another attempt at making a major motion picture based on the works of the Marvel Comics Group. Leave it to the house that Freddy Krueger built to do something right.
Produced by New Line Cinema in 1998, Blade stars Wesley Snipes as the title character, a half-human/half vampire warrior committed to wiping out the undead, with the help of his friend and mentor, Whistler (played by Kris Kristofferson). Blade has his sights set on Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff), an impetuous bloodsucker who wants to eliminate the vampire establishment so he can rule the human world himself. At the same time, Blade must protect a doctor (N'Bushe Wright) who was bitten by vampires and may also hold the key to curing his increasing thirst for human blood.
Blade is such a cool movie. That's what I thought when I first saw it. I didn't know much about the character (created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan) at that point, but I dug the fact that it was an honest-to-goodness monster movie- which weren't many of in the post-Scream 90's- with a little martial arts thrown in. It was like Big Trouble in Little China for the Total Request Live crowd. Looking at it now, it's surprising to see that Blade still has plenty of bite. It's well-put-together for an empty-headed shoot-em-up. Director Stephen Norrington's visual style is solid. There's plenty of action, a lot of blood, and even some trusty ol' jump scares. Screenwriter David Goyer (who is a comic book fan) treated the character of Blade with respect, and Wesley Snipes's portrayal is iconic.
This movie is sooooo cool, it's easy now to see how influential it was. Blade was the beginning of the action/horror hybrid. It's not the first time those two genres have been mixed (Aliens did a damn good job of it a dozen years before), but Blade was the film that made it a thing. For better or for worse, because of Blade we got Resident Evil, the Underworld series, House of the Dead, I, Frankenstein... Hey, I did say for better or for worse, right?
This movie is so, so cool. Maybe too cool for it's own good, because Blade is pretty dated. There's the MTV-style editing, the late-90s electronica music, and some early CGI that hasn't aged too well. Plus, Stephen Dorff's Deacon Frost, with his mussed hair, cigarette-smoking, and hip charm, is just another one of those Tarantino-esque bad guys that seemed to be in every movie back then.
Those aren't really serious gripes about the film, I must admit. You can't really knock a movie for being dated on a superficial level. I'm just having too much fun reflecting on a motion picture from a point in my youth where I was well aware of the times I was living in. Today, Blade continues to hold up as a pretty good genre cross-breed that puts all its imitators to shame and remains immortal alongside modern Marvel cinema.
- JDO
Blade
3 1/2 out of 5 Cap shields.
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