Review: Blade

When Blade was released in 1998, it was an oddity for a lot of reasons. An action film starring Wesley Snipes based on the Marvel Comics character, the action/horror film stood out back then. Today of course a comic book movie is just another Friday.

Director Steve Norrington is known for two films, this and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was, well, bad. So rewatching Blade for the first time since it came out, I was expecting the film to be unimpressive. I mean, Wesley Snipes can be good, but definitely not always, and he is in a lot of mediocre films. So I was surprised to find that Blade was good. The script, the direction, the fight choreography. More than two decades (and lots of superhero movies) later, I’ll put Blade on a list of the best comic book movies.

Admittedly, that’s not a long list.

It’s a Wesley Snipes movie, but it’s also a pretty one note performance - Blade is a very one note kind of character - so a lot of the weight falls on the supporting cast, who manage to balance the film in different ways. The great Kris Kristofferson plays Abraham Whistler, Blade’s grizzled old mentor, who might have been as cold as Blade once upon a time, but now it’s softened by age and his concern for his adopted son. N’Bushe Wright as the doctor who gets caught up in this, and would be the love interest except that, well, Blade isn’t into love or human emotions. Meanwhile Donal Logue offers comic relief as a vampire who can handle a lot of damage and is entertaining as all hell.

Whatever happened to N’Bushe Wright?

The main villain though is played by Stephen Dorff, who is Deacon Frost, a young punk of a vampire who is waging his own war against other vamps. A ruling council composed of the well-dressed accented, monsters we know in films has their own way of doing things, but Frost has his own ideas, from the wild parties, to decoding ancient texts searching for the answers in what others have dismissed as myth. It’s a fascinating character and Dorff enjoys chewing scenery as he kills other vampires and grabs a young child to have a conversation with Blade in the middle off the day. He has his own ideas of how vampires should act and not simply sit in the shadows.

Admittedly I keep thinking the script could have used another draft but those dynamics are there and they work. It’s not a deep movie, but it knows what it’s trying to do. And has a cast that can pull it off.

It is very much a film of the 1990’s. From the rave opening (which is a fabulous scene) to the lighting and the dark shadows. It definitely leans into that goth tone and sensibility of The Crow and other films of that era. It also builds from the vampire and horror stories being written at this time. I found myself enjoying it. Blade is a dark, brutal film and it was enjoyable in a way that a good genre film can be. Managing to both satisfy my expectations and also do something new. But director Norrington and the cinematographer Theo van de Sande manage to do an impressive job.

That’s not to say that the film doesn’t have issues. The ending of the film falls flat. I remember thinking that when I first saw the film. Much of it takes place in Los Angeles, in these dark corners of the city at night. Then we go to the desert nearby where there’s an ancient temple underground. Then the final fight between Blade and Frost is just okay, but it’s not one of the better fights in the film. After the earlier fights as Blade takes on various henchmen, which were much more impressive, this is very much a fight where a guy had other people fight because he couldn’t. Then to conclude a mediocre fight, Frost gets injected with - well, let’s not get into all that - but the result is a CGI explosion, which looked fake when the film came out and looks possibly worse now. But I’m more forgiving of bad CGI today because I know fo the technical limitations. So I don’t take as many points off as I might have once upon a time.

But in this, it’s like most superhero films where they have some interesting ideas and fight scenes and design work and cinematography in the first two acts of the film, but the third act is, well, boring. Because beyond have the hero fight the villain, the filmmakers don’t know have other ideas. Though at least here the plan is straight forward: Stop Deacon Frost and kill everyone. There’s a brutal simplicity to it.

I know that Blade is coming back, this time with Mahershala Ali as Blade. And Ali is a great actor and I hope that they build a good film around him (and that the film is better than Green Book, which isn’t a particularly high hurdle). But I’ve read some of the old comics from Mark Wolfman and Gene Colan, which were similarly genre work that aspired to be more than just another comic. In Tomb of Dracula, the series where Blade and others fought the titular villain, they struggled to kill Dracula time and again. And there’s a way where this could feel like another comic book device where the villain always escapes and never dies, but in that comic they made it feel ominous. That the characters managed to avoid the worst, foil the plot, but the villain and the evil seemed as though they were impossible to defeat. The film manages to capture some of that feeling.

Again, it’s a very nineties movie. But it was fun. And it fairly sure it’s not because I’m feeling slightly nostalgic for the nineties.