Blade (1998) * * * 1/2 A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
BLADE is the single best example of a live-action movie that draws its lifeblood from the comics. Not only is it adapted from one -- albeit a minor one -- it's designed from the ground up to give us the feel, the smell, the you-name-it of a comic book's kinetics and adrenalin. It works. As someone else once said, "If this film WAS a comic book, my fingers would be black from it."
Wesley Snipes stars as the title character, who was born shortly after his mother was bitten by a vampire. Thanks to this, he has the advantages of both vampire and human strains, and in conjunction with his sidekick and weapons-smith, Whistler (Kris Kristofferson, very good), he's engaged in a one-man war against vampire-kind. The war is about to be escalated, too: Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff, scary as hell), one of the young-turk vampires, has managed to decipher information about an old vampire legend that could unleash unbelievable power and destruction. Blade outfits himself with some truly savage weapons, including a booby-trapped sword that has to be seen to be believed, and wreaks havoc.
Into the middle of this stumbles a doctor (N'Bushe Wright, also very good), who gets mauled and infected, and must trust herself to Blade for both protection and understanding. She's convinced there's a way to undo the vampire curse; he's not -- he's wrestled with it long and hard himself, and there are signs the vampire half of him is winning.
BLADE stands out for a number of reasons. I mentioned the look-and-feel, but there are some subtle dimensions to the way the movie plays out. Rather than cap off each action scene with a hard climax, the scenes taper off gently -- sort of the way the end of one comic issue leads into the next, to keep you reading. The result is that instead of having the action just stop and eliciting applause from the audience, everything rolls smoothly along into the next sequence. There's also a good deal of experimentalism with the camera -- time-lapse, stop-motion, jagged angles, but none of it is overused or cliched. It all feels fresh.
Snipes plays Blade as an uneasy amalgam of tough guy and scared loner. When he grins and postures, he slumps a second later, because for all his bravado he's vulnerable and very alone, and he knows it. Wright, as the doctor, is a great ordinary-hero type: she starts off unwitting and confused, and then learns very, very fast. There is one scene where she verbally intimidates Frost which, all by itself, lifts the movie up another notch.
There are other things in the movie that show smarts and creativity: the younger vampires are clearly pattered after '90s "heroin chic" models, with their hollowed eyes and rag-tag wardrobes. There's also more than a hint of a racial allegory, since most of the protagonists are black -- something which is a nice sign that the color line in big Hollywood productions is finally dissolving. If it had just been an ass-kicking vehicle, that would have been good, but Snipes and the rest of the movie's crew took this story and pushed it up to the next level, and made it something really special.
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