Playing Call of Duty is probably a much better use of one's time than watching this film

Rating: 3/10 (23 December 2011)

I saw this film quite a while ago and hated it and wondered whether it was because I had been bitten by the bug that creates such a high expectation in a movie that when I see it I am bitterly disappointed because it did not meet my expectations. So, I decided to give it another shot, and once again was bitterly disappointed. No, it was not that I had high expectations, but rather it was because this film was actually rubbish.
Blade is based on the marvel comic book of the same name as is about a 'daywalker' a half-vampire that has all of their strengths, but none of their weaknesses, with the exception of their thirst for blood. Blade (Wesley Snipes) was born after his mother had been bitten by a vampire but before she had turned, so she was still, partly at least, human. It is unclear what had happened to him between his birth and when he was found by Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) at the age of 13 and together they became a team of vampire hunters. The movie begins when a young man is being lured into a vampire nest to feed, and the man is rescued by Blade in his hunt for a renegade named Frost.
Now, in this universe, the vampires are divided between the pure-bloods (those born vampires) and the turned (those who become vampires after they are bitten), and the hierarchy is set in that order. Then there are the familiars, those who sell themselves to the vampires in a hope that one day they will become vampires. As Blade explains to Karen, a haematologist that he rescues after she is attacked by the vampires that he is tracking, that they are a race that live apart from humanity and have a treaty with humans not to abuse their powers.
However, there are those within the vampire ranks who desire to rule over the humans, Deacon Frost being one of them, and he is researching the ancient texts so that he might become the Blood God and thus turn the tide of the war between the humans and the vampires. However as it turns out the vampires are actually manipulating humanity from behind the scenes and ruling them from the shadows. As Blade explains, they control the police, but move from city to city keeping in the shadows.
Now the question is why I did not like this film. Personally, it was really clichéd. Now, unfortunately, vampires in and of themselves are clichéd, and have been this way ever since Bram Stoker first wrote his story about vampires (Dracula). Now, don't get me wrong, Dracula is actually quite a good book, but in a sense it has been quite overdone, from the old silent classic Nosferatu, to the many copies that have appeared on the cinema screens ever since. However, Vampires are still quite popular (as can be seen with the Twilight novels and films which, to me, are rubbish). The problem is that once one sees something a vampire story that is really good, it sets a benchmark which makes it very difficult to exceed, and to me that turned out to be the role-playing game Vampire (of which I will not go into details here).
Obviously in a film one does have a very limited space to be able to set the scene, but still, I feel that this film does fail on in a lot of areas, and if I were to label one scene, and that is where Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorf) appears in daylight and survives, namely because he is wearing sunblock. Seriously, that, to me, is rubbish. He simply should have burnt up like all of the other vampires that are exposed to sunlight.
As this film came to the end it reminded me of a video game, namely it was a series of fight scenes interspersed by some cut scenes that help move the story along, and then, at the end, the hero fights the big bad guy, and wins. Video games have changed a lot since the days of space invaders, and are multi-million dollar productions in and of themselves. It seems that a lot of the action films follow the format of your average video games these days, though games tend to be a lot longer than your average movies, though I also know (and I have done it myself) that people will sit and watch others play these games. As for me, I tend to like a bit more depth and less cliché in my films.