Just What We Needed a Comic Book Vampire Hero

Rating: 8/10 (1 April 2019)

Our hero Blade (Wesley Snipes) is part vampire (his mother was bitten just before he was born) who is out to rid the world of vampires so that everyone else can live happily ever after and he can live with himself. In order to satisfy his thirst for blood he takes a plasma serum that his mentor and fellow vampire hunter Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) developed, but its effectiveness is waning. Also along for the ride is a doctor (N'Bushe Wright) who was unlucky enough to also get bitten by a vampire but who is conveniently a hematologist who just might be able to develop a cure for our heroes problem. Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff) is our hero's nemesis, a leader among the vampires who were infected as opposed to the more reserved purebred vampires, and just to make things a little more interesting Frost has a sinister plot in motion that must be stopped.
Snipes is well cast in a role he could sink his teeth into (sorry), it may not be the role of a lifetime but was certainly an improvement over some of the parts he had inexplicably taken. In the character of Blade we get an intriguing tortured hero, and while this isn't a character piece its still interesting to watch. As for the rest of the cast, Kristofferson is fine in a fairly stock role, but both Dorff and Wright are fairly forgettable.
A movie with lots of noise, lots of gore and lots of visual effects, it's certainly enjoyable on a live action comic book level. The two sequels have their moments but aren't nearly as interesting movies