BLADE (New Line) Starring: Wesley Snipes, Stephen Dorff, Kris Kristofferson, N'Bushe Wright, Donal Logue. Screenplay: David S. Goyer, based on the character published by Marvel Comics. Producers: Peter Frankfurt, Wesley Snipes and Robert Engelman. Director: Stephen Norrington. MPAA Rating: R (violence, gore, profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 118 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
BLADE is a comic book adaptation, which in recent years has meant you could expect one of two approaches: brooding and violent (THE CROW, SPAWN) or gaudy and hyper-kinetic (BATMAN AND ROBIN, THE MASK, TANK GIRL). BLADE is no exception...sort of. Instead of choosing one familiar path or the other, the makers of BLADE have chosen both -- it's brooding, gaudy, violent _and_ hyper-kinetic. The surprising good news is that it comes impressively close to succeeding at both. The bad news is that means it doesn't entirely succeed at either one.
The premise alone is intriguing enough to give it a fair shot. In a prologue set thirty years ago, we see a woman dying from a vampire attack just as she gives birth to a son. Flash forward to the present day, where that son has grown up to be Blade (Wesley Snipes), a hybrid with all the strength of a vampire but none of the weaknesses -- he can walk in daylight with impunity, eat a pizza with extra garlic, and so on. That makes him ideally suited for his vocation as vampire hunter, which he and his weapons guru/mentor Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) carry out with extreme prejudice. His latest challenge is a young upstart named Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff, the poor man's Kevin Bacon), who plans to unleash some sort of vampiric armageddon upon humanity unless Blade can cut him down to size first.
All right, the latter portion doesn't qualify as any sort of intriguing. It's more in that gaudy and hyper-kinetic category, a climactic conclusion to two hours of punishing, extremely sanguine action. It's also extremely effective action, directed by former special effects make-up artist Stephen Norrington at the kind of blistering pace generally associated with Jackie Chan films. Make no mistake, BLADE _moves_, with dynamic fight sequences and a parade of gruesome special effects -- exploding vampire heads, disintegrating vampire bodies, vampire skeletons crawling out of their skins. With Snipes anchoring the action as the chiseled anti-hero, BLADE's frenzied, over-the-top battles offer plenty of visceral thrills.
Of course, it has to pause every once in a while for exposition, which usually is where films of this kind collapse into a puddle of stupidity. BLADE, on the other hand, teases with provocative concepts that ultimately go nowhere. The tormented hero is nothing new in the modern "graphic novel" comic book milieu, but BLADE adds the notion of our protagonist as (in Deacon's words) a vampire Uncle Tom, trying to pass himself off as human because he's uncomfortable with his vampire lineage. There are more hints of vampires as a persecuted minority in scenes of a vampire council discussing how they have struck bargains with humans for their mutual survival. When the militant Deacon rejects the assimilation tactics of his elders in favor of "vampire power," it could have been the basis for more complex themes than you'd ever expect from a comic book thriller. Is Blade, for all his righteous wrath, merely engaging in a sort of "ethnic cleansing?" Could Deacon just be firing up a "we're here, we're vampires, get used to it" civil rights movement?
Interesting questions, if anyone had bothered to ask them. Unfortunately, the politics of vampirism quickly gives way to simple, rapid-fire good guy vs. bad guy stuff. There's a token pseudo-romantic interest (N'Bushe Wright), a thick-headed henchman (Donal Logue), and a villain whose only distinguishing characteristic is his villainy. BLADE keeps setting you up to expect that the sub-text is going to matter somehow, then always bails out for another round of spinning back-kicks and shotgun blasts. I suppose you could take a glass-half-full view and applaud both the quality of the action and the mere attempt to give depth to the viscera. There's just too much viscera, and not enough depth, to take that attempt seriously. It's an exciting under-achiever -- to brooding to be pure gaudy fun, to gaudy to let its brooding go anywhere interesting.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 double-edged blades: 5.
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