New bat-man, inane glitzy fun
Blade A Film Review By Michael Redman Copyright 1998 By Michael Redman
**1/2
Occasionally I'm in the mood to forget about art, story, characterization and everything that makes a film worthwhile. During those times, I'm content to just sit in a dark room watching glitzy pictures flash by on the big white wall. Fortunately this was my state of mind while viewing "Blade".
Blade (Wesley Snipes) is one tough SOB. Half-vampire, half-human, he has all the strength and speed of the bloodsuckers and none of their weaknesses to garlic, sunlight or silver. He's armed with silver stakes, big guns with silver bullets and a huge sword. Revenge for the death of his mother is his motivation for turning the world's fiends into dust.
The film's opening scenes follow a woman leading her male friend into a secret hip disco. (You can tell that it's hip because there are lesbian couples dancing and a threesome making out on a couch in the corner.) The man is digging the techno beat, flashing lights and overt sexuality until blood starts raining down from the sprinkler system. Then he realizes that he's been brought to the rave by his vamp paramour as prey.
Enter Blade. Single-handedly he starts wiping out the dancers. One after another, they are blasted by his shotgun and dissolve into sparkling ectoplasmic powder.
Later he rescues Karen (N'Bushe Wright), a hematologist who has been bitten. She is what passes for the love interest in the movie, with the exception of a subsequent episode that would make Oedipus blush. His only other human contact is crotchety urban hermit Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) who rescued the young Blade and makes his weapons for him.
Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff), the leader of the angry young vampire Turks, is Blade's nemesis. Turned into an undead by a bite, Frost also opposes the staid older vampires-from-birth international cartel who meet in a boardroom like the suits that run IBM. Commenting on their secret negotiations with humans, he asks why they make deals with their food.
He isn't content to coexist with what he considers lower life forms. He wants to rule them. The Goth Generation X vampires are like decedent spoiled children of the rich, dancing and feasting the night away.
Frost has secretly been translating ancient writings that describe how to summon the Blood God who will bring about the vampire jyhad. Blade finds out and realizes that this could put a crimp in his plan to destroy the evil vermin. They eventually meet at an inevitable brutal Hong Kong style showdown in an enormous underground ancient-future cathedral.
The acting is nothing to write home about, but fitting to the film. Snipes is as wooden and emotionless as you might expect an obsessive killer to be. Dorff is snappy as he sneers his lines reminiscent of Keifer Sutherland in Lost Boys. Rhodes scholar-turned songwriter-turned rock star-turned actor Kristofferson, a personal favorite, is always entertaining but under-used here. His eccentric character provides some of the humor especially in a scene where he slops gasoline around while lighting his cigarette.
Director Stephen Norrington's filmmaking is stylish to the extreme and it works in this film. Extremely short cuts of vampires snarling and glimpsed beings scurrying around are like things seen out of the corner of the eye. The jerky super-speed moments are surprisingly effective.
The sexual aspects of vampirism are used well. There's a lot of licking and messy wet sliding around. One particularly eroticized incident features the female victim gasping in ecstasy as her blood is drained away. Her seducer howls in gratification when he finishes.
The movie has more than its share of faults. Seemingly every object in every set is made of glass just waiting to be shattered. None of the characters are real. The underground vampire structure is centuries old and looks cool, but it just happens to exist in the same US city as the rest of the story?
There are scenes lifted completely from "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" and other films. The computer effects occasionally look poor and are redundant. Seen one exploding head, seen 'em all. There's a huge hole in Frost's plan. If everyone is transformed into vampires, what do they eat? The Blood God is a disappointment.
The biggest disappointment is the climax of Blade and Frost's battle. After all of the high energy action during the movie, the last minute or so of that are a letdown. It was so low-key that I kept waiting for more.
There is an interesting subtext of elite groups engaging in war while regarding the rest of the world as inferiors. The vampires see everyone as blood machines. Blade regards most other humans as ignorant and beneath his attention. He savagely beats a vampire-collaborator cop in the middle of a busy street without the least thought to on-lookers. He's in a secret war zone and the mundanes don't matter.
His attitude is what terrorists must feel. Their cause is righteous and if innocents get in the way, too bad. Hidden wars have a long history: the CIA vs. the KGB, the Tong and Mafia wars, the struggle between criminals and law enforcement. It's interesting to get an inside look at what goes on around us.
This is a poorly plotted ridiculous film, but it's a well made poorly plotted ridiculous film. Sometimes on these blistering dog days, that and air conditioning are enough.
(Michael Redman has scrawled these words of wisdom for over 23 years and seems to have emoved with the paper's name change. Point your electrons to redman@indepen.com.)
[This appeared in the 8/26/98 "Bloomington Independent", Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be contacted at redman@indepen.com] -- mailto:redman@indepen.com This week's film review at http://www.indepen.com/ Film reviews archive at http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Michael%20Redman
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