Fighting Modern Vampires in the Big City

Rating: 7/10 (4 February 2006)

It's a glimpse into how Hollywood works and thinks that, with all the primo Marvel super-heroes to choose from, even including 2nd-tier heroes like Luke Cage & the Panther, the first successful big budget Marvel film is based on an obscure supporting character from the little-known 'Tomb of Dracula' comic book. The key to the success was upgrading the Blade (Snipes) character to be a cool bad-ass in the big city, with neat weapons and wardrobe, not to mention super powers lacking in the original comic book version. On initial glance, the movie could be a standard action thriller from the nineties, but director Norrington imbued this with enough style and mythology to make this a cut above most of those. Rather than an old Gothic atmosphere, everything points towards the modern, the sleek. The actual 'Dracula' character isn't present; instead there's an entire secret cabal of vampires, ruling in secret - for one reason or another it seems all of the police force is employed by them. There are different 'grades' of vampire in this story - those born as vamps and those turned. The so-called pure bloods form a ruling council. They exist in an unspecified truce with human bigwigs i.e. politicians - which comes as no surprise, I suppose - all bloodsuckers would support one another, right?
Also borrowed from the comic books is the villain vampire Frost (Dorff), portrayed as an elder man in the books, but here a turned arrogant punk aiming to change the status quo. The more interesting aspects of the story have to do with the internal conflict among the new age and the older generation of vampires, not the usual battles between humans and vampire monsters. Blade himself in not really human, being a kind of hybrid, having the strengths of a typical vampire and none of their weaknesses (sunlight, garlic). His fights are martial arts-influenced, with the added FX shots of his opponents disintegrating as a fatal blow is struck. Some dark amusement is provided by Donal Logue as Frost's no.2 vamp, never quite getting that killing blow from Blade, just losing a limb every other scene. Logue and Dorff, tho, never seem quite in sync in their scenes together, with Logue stressing the humor and Dorff playing it very straight. But they manage, in conjunction, to provide the necessary menace for Blade and his allies to stand against.
The film veers a bit into inane territory for the climax, when Frost is planning to unleash something called 'La Magra' on the world, which I believe was meant to turn everyone into vampires. Instead of the planned 'blood god' FX, we get a souped-up version of vampirism in Frost and some extra martial arts effort from Blade to wrap things up. Snipes is stolid as the hero, letting loose a grin every now and then when the prospect of graphic violence rises up. He and fellow vampire-killer Whistler (Kristofferson) are supposedly close friends but you get the impression they're together only because they both hate vampires. It's a rather somber unemotional world they both exist in, with nothing more than resolute soldiering a guiding force. Blade would continue to soldier on in two sequels.