YO BOB GOES TO THE MOVIES
This weekÕs question: how is it possible for a film to be both tongue-in-cheek _and_ completely devoid of irony?
I didnÕt mean to see _Blade_. IÕd heard the basic elements--Wesley Snipes, vampires--and wasnÕt especially intrigued. Snipes hasnÕt been particularly watchable since _Jungle Fever_ (okay, it took chutzpah to do _To Wong Foo..._, but any connoisseur of drag queen road movies will tell you what an inferior product that was), and I doubted another superhero flick would reverse the downhill trend. Earlier that day IÕd finally gotten around to watching Robert AltmanÕs great film _Short Cuts_ on video, and when my friends Josh and Paul suggested going to see _54_, it sounded like a suitable follow-up. At the theater, unfortunately, we discovered that _54_ wasnÕt starting until the next day. Wesley won out over Drew Barrymore and _Air Bud 2_.
_Blade_ is the polar opposite of _Short Cuts_. The latter is an intelligent, original film, hilarious and sad and subtle, one of AltmanÕs clear triumphs. It is also rife with irony. _Blade_ shares none of these qualities, except perhaps hilarity. I did laugh, but IÕm still not sure how much of that was intended by the filmmakers.
Two of the two-and-a-half stars I give this movie belong to the first five minutes of screentime, a knockout opening sequence that ranks with the best filmed imagery of vampires IÕve ever seen. Two of the two-and-a-half stars I _didnÕt_ give were out of pique at the movieÕs failure to live up to its promise. It just isnÕt fair for a sequence that strong to give way to such an unrelenting schlockfest.
It must be said that none of the principal actors are onscreen in the first five minutes. Night in the city: a girl leads a guy through a meat locker into an underground techno club that turns out to be chock-full of raving bloodsuckers. They turn on him. I was surprised to feel real fear when it happened--surprised because, like most good consumers of pop culture, IÕve been saturated with vampire clichˇs courtesy of Brad Pitt, Gary Oldman (note: CoppolaÕs _Dracula_ remains the worst of the genre) and Sarah Michelle Gellar. ItÕs rare these days that a horror film possesses the ability, nevermind the courage, to actually horrify. But _Blade_ does, for a few titillating moments.
And then, dammit, Wesley Snipes shows up lookinÕ all chocolate cheesecake, wearing complicated latex and wielding a sword that turns vampires into sizzling yellow skeletons. HeÕs Blade, heÕs one bad mother (shutcho mouth!) and no one understands him but Whistler, a shaggy, squinty-eyed redneck played by Kris Kristofferson. Together they battle the undead establishment with garlic-filled silver bullets and UV flashlights. When an attractive doctor gets bitten, Blade takes her to their bunker and injects her with liquid garlic to save her, because, well, sheÕs an attractive doctor. Not that he has time for so much as a peck on the cheek between slaughtering his mortal enemies.
In other words, _Blade_ becomes another superhero flick, a crashing, blaring assault designed for maximum appeal to its target demographic. No MTV-approved trend is left unfondled. The music is cold electronica, the violence is close-up gore, and every opportunity to substitute cheesy computer graphics for live action is exploited. While no one actually has sex, the movieÕs approach to the concept of evil is positively pornographic: that is to say, blunt, obvious, manipulative and shallow.
So much about _Blade_ is ridiculously contrived that _The Shadow_ seems Altmanesque in comparison. Why is the librarian vampire an enormous, Hutt-like slug creature? How does the attractive doctor survive being tossed from one skyscraper to the roof of another, several stories below, with nary a scratch? Why does the serum...
Okay, nevermind. ItÕs supposed to be over-the-top fun, not a homework assignment. And it doesnÕt take extraordinary intelligence to see that a lot of _Blade_ is played for laughs, not chills. But interspersed with moments of ghoulish humor (especially a scene where the doctor is confronted by the shambling, rotting zombie of her ex-boyfriend, who groans ŅDo you ever think about getting back together?Ó) are scenes too gruesome to snicker at, too stupid to take seriously. I would have swallowed this nonsense as simple lowbrow comedy if I hadnÕt caught Snipes and Stephen Dorff (a fine actor, here slumming as the arch-vamp) trying to squeeze actual emotion from the rubber duckies of their roles. This movie has no clue where to go, and further insults us by spreading its legs for a sequel. If _Blade II_ ever sees production, pray for us all.
You want a good vampire movie? See _Near Dark_ or _The Addiction_.
You want a supernatural comedy that works? Watch _Ghostbusters_ or _Army of Darkness_ again.
Just donÕt subject yourself to this miserable exercise in hara-kiri.
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