Good effects and much fighting, but no horror

Rating: 2/10 (1 February 1999)

When I saw the first announcement for this film, I thought it must be great (I'm a big Wesley Snipes fan). Seeing the preview lowered my expectations, and the movie itself was a disappointment.
It is most of the time nothing but an average action movie, and even if the effects and fighting scenes are good to excellent, the story itself was quite flat and boring, and there was nothing about horror. The vampires were just evil humans with some special abilities, not a symbol of forces or fears in our subconciousness, our animal inside, or of natural forces (such as the pest), or such. The start of the film is the best part of the whole picture; Traci Lords plays Racquel (even if nobody ever calls her with a name in the movie), a vampire woman, which takes a human victim (a man which believes she loves/likes him) to a vampire disco. That whole scene culminates more and more and really makes you shiver - it was a very good start --- until Blade appears and starts the first of the well known boring good hero fights: the good hero kills everybody (i.e. every vampire) and is soooo cool and soooo invinceable and sooooo boring... one of the vampires he kills is Racquel, and later I thought that this was quite symbolical, for she has been the one which had ruled the only really good scene of the movie. The later film never comes back to the level of the start. There are some nice jokes in it (exploding vampire blood etc), and many effects are excellent (but not that strange scene where the blood god is created. that looks just absurd), but the fighting is nothing but the well-known typical unrealistic stuff. In all his films, Wesley Snipes is a natural cool one; but here he _tries_ to be cool all the time, and becomes, of course, very uncool this way.
This film has been compared to Spawn, but Spawn is a totally different kind of film; a good family movie where good fights against evil, and good wins. At least that movie was not promising what it cannot keep. Of course, the film about Spawn was very different than the comic; while Blade was really close. But I expect more of a vampire movie, especially if they have such excellent actors, than only an action movie with expensive effects.