Blew me away

Rating: Null/10 (24 August 1999)

When I first heard that they were making Blade into a movie, I read that L.L. Cool J was interested in playing the character of Blade and was doing his best to get the film made. Naturally, when Wesley Snipes got the film off the ground and into production, the thought of Blade I had was a cheap straight to video title that would fade into obscurity with other comic-book movie adaptations such as the Punisher with Dolph Lundgren and the rare Fantastic Four movie. Little did I expect what I saw. When I first viewed the trailer, I was hooked. I love Hong Kong action films and escapist Sci-Fi cinema such as Blade Runner, and the trailer gave this movie elements of both such genres. To top that off, it did not portray Blade as a comic book character, but as a rather subdued anti-hero. Still, I was in for a shock when I actually saw the film. In my opinion, I must say that the opening fight sequence is the most brutal and violent action sequence I had ever seen in a Western film. It was fast, well-paced, and graphically violent. But therein laid the problem I had with the film. Blade seemed to be an unstoppable killing machine capable of dispatching vampires left and right (which he did in several key action sequences), but the vampires themselves were portrayed as somewhat wimpish, almost begging to be staked. I would have expected that vampires would be a little more difficult to dispatch, given the nature of what they are, but they seemed to go down like grass before a lawn-mower. Maybe I was missing something here, but most of the other movies I have seen with vampires in them (like Bram Stoker's Dracula and Fright Night), vampires didn't always just crumple up and die. They usually put up a good fight. Its like this in Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the WB as well, but they tend to fight back more than in Blade. But as I watched on, this concern seemed to take a back seat to what I was witnessing. Some of the other points about the way vampires lived in society seemed to be taken from the White Wolf game Vampire: the Masquerade, and some of the other factors of vampiric biology seemed a bit of a stretch (like a cure for vampirism), but once again I tended to let this slide as I was watching on. But these problems nagged me, and hampered my overall enjoyment of this film. I doubt many of these issues would be addressed in the sequel, which I hope to see in the summer of 2000, but there is always hope that they will take the time to reason some of these faults out. I personally hope that with the death of the Batman films and with Superman's new movie being placed on the backburner at Warner, Blade will fill the niche left open by a lack of a cool comic book film. However, it will have to be an incredible sequel as it is likely that the X-Men movie will be out the same summer. As long as they stick to the look and feel of the first film, and iron out some of those pesky bugs, they may have a successful franchise on their hands. Here's looking forward to Blade 5, if they can keep the plot going that long!