of the major horror sub - genres , vampire movies are easily the most adaptable .
think about it .
frankenstein movies have n't changed all that much because they still need that mad - scientist - in - bavarian - castle setting . if you made a frankenstein movie today , you 'd have to have the monster be a virus or something -- and outside of michael j .
fox , there are n't any actors that could play a virus convincingly .
movies about mummies would still have to be set in egypt .
there 's not much you can do with werewolves except take them to london or paris , unless you want to have a teenage werewolf or something .
( and there 's that michael
j .
fox thing again . )
but you can have vampires do anything , and you can place them in any genre you want , just about .
you can have traditional vampire movies ( bram stoker 's dracula ) or have the anne rice version ( interview with the vampire ) , or play it for laughs ( vampire in brooklyn ) .
you can put vampires in locales from sunny southern california ( the lost boys ) to squalid mexican dives ( from dusk till dawn ) to your local high school ( buffy , the vampire slayer ) .
were it not redundant , you could have a movie about a law firm full of vampires .
any day now , i expect we 'll see a movie about a vampire third baseman who has to decide whether to play a day game in order to break the home run record .
or , you can insert the vampire legend into a hong kong action movie -- and when you do that , you get blade .
wesley snipes has the chow yun fat role in this movie -- the silent , expressionless hit man who destroys everything in his path .
in this case , the everything happens to be vampires that explode into cgi shards instead of dead , bleeding corpses .
snipes has less to say here than as the fugitive in u . s . marshals , but does a demonstrably better job here as a half - vampire wreaking vengeance on the bloodsuckers .
blade is a silent , brooding presence , laying waste to vampires without a shred of remorse .
he is as cold as his silver - bladed sword , as single minded as his garlic - filled bullets .
yet , he 's not without quirks :
blade drives a battered muscle car and has to glean rolex watches from his vampire victims in order to stay solvent .
like any good hong kong movie , blade is heavy on the chopsocky action .
for some reason , blade spends a lot more time using his kung fu artistry than using the traditional anti - vampire weapons of garlic and silver .
( blade dismisses a man - portable arc lamp as being too heavy , although it looks to be a more efficient tool to dispatch vampires . )
unfortunately , the guiding hand of john woo is absent from this film , relegating blade to the status of the replacement killers , which it most strongly resembles .
the replacement killers is the last movie i saw that i did n't review -- mostly because it made no impression on me , and i could n't remember anything other than noise , violence , and the intensity of fat 's performance .
blade has a little more going for it , and has the vampire myth to draw from -- but other than that , it 's the same kind of movie -- exciting , with well choreographed action scenes ,
but with no resonance .
with a stronger villain ( stephen dorff is ( pardon the pun ) curiously bloodless as the head vampire , leaving us to wonder what denis leary might have done with the role ) , a wittier script , and a strong supporting cast , blade might have been able to rise beyond the level of commonplace summer entertainment .
as it is , blade is an average action movie that serves to do nothing but remind us that the summer movies just keep getting dumber and
the vampire movies just keep multiplying .
does a demonstrably better job here has a little more going for it exciting , with well choreographed action scenes