Dark & edgy serial comic book propaganda; & it is cooked off its edge!

Rating: 8/10 (31 May 2020)

Wesley Snipes is perfectly cast as Blade, a half human, half vampire known the day walker. He has all their strengths and his only weakness is the thirst for blood. Since he teamed up with Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) he has hunted down vampires who have lived amongst us unnoticed for centuries, but omnipotent overlord Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff) is tired of living in harmony with the humans, as food, and he plans to waken the Blood God and take control of the world
David Goyer did a stroke of genius when he took the character of Blade and turned him into a leather clad dark knight. He can't take all the credit though and much of this must go to Stephen Norrington as well who with his distinct visual style brings out the best of the character. The Blade character is pretty amazing in this film and mixes martial arts with Batman like darkness. Snipes is pretty good as the title character and is successful in bringing out the duality and inner demons of the character. Stephen Dorff provides the best acting in the film and his chilling performance as Deacon Frost stands as one of the best screen villains. While overall bad comic book movies were so bad that they were entertaining, Blade is entertaining because the action is good. There are some typical action cliches but nothing too annoying for the viewer. The overall story is thin but again, nothing too bad.
The story is good and renews the vampire genre by adding a lot of contemporary elements and maintaining the comic book feel. By saying that the film has a comic book feel does not mean that the film is unrealistic. Far from it. A lot of effort has been put in trying to make the film seem as real as possible. Including the effects which are pretty good for their time. The vampire "dustings" are a very nice touch. In stead of adding a lot of blood when a vampire dies Norrington chose to let the vampires spontaneously combust which looks great. Vampire movies are usually considered to be low quality. For the most part, that is the case these days. But every now and then a good vampire movie comes up and in the 90's there were 3 vampire films that are considered to be the best.
The film maintains it's dark edge with retrospective Gothic production, snappy one liners, & sudden violence. This may sound like cliches, but Stephen Norrington is able to direct the film through a Gothic style of its own. The screening time of 2 hours is not cumbersome. There are fresh surprises in every scene. The production design is tremendously visual & candy, with an intuitive & simplistic comic aspect to the production layering & screening.
This movie pops right out of the pages onto the screen with sheer violence, blood, martial arts, weapons, fire, & the good against evil. Yes sure a lot of action flicks contain all these goodies, and most of them have bombed. But not Blade, the movie was filmed just right, not going overboard, delivering a good length and never a dull moment. Blade is a fantastic action thriller that keeps you captured for the whole duration and Wesley Snipes delivers what I would say to be his best performance yet.