- Title: Blade
- IMDb: link
Spooky Saturday takes us back t0 a movie that even if it contained a commentary track by Carson Daly filmed inside the TRL studio could still not be more 1998. Wesley Snipes stars as the Marvel Comics character who helps out a doctor bitten by a vampire and protects the world from skeezy vampire withe delusions of grandeur (Stephen Dorff) from taking it over. The film is notable for aspects of its style which look to have heavily influenced the first Matrix movie and for making Blade the character look good on film.
More concerned with making Snipes cool than crafting a good movie or fleshing out a world leads to a mess of a script as quite a few questionable casting decisions such as Donal Logue as the comic relief heavy and, of course, Dorff who would be in the running for worst comic book villain of all time if not for choices made in Blade: Trinity. Other than Snipes, the only other performance of note is by Kris Kristofferson who added some emotional weight to a handful of scenes as Blade’s Obi-Wan.
Blade can’t decide whether people know or don’t know about vampires, a key issue to the film as it suggests politicians and police do know which seems to be the case after the club but we also see shoot-first police confounded by Blade’s existence at the hospital. And surely, in a world with vampires, hospitals and first responders aren’t going to be completely caught of guard by their existence as they no doubt would have seen countless examples of what they left behind, right? However, to make the script work, that’s exactly what needs to happen with Karen (N’Bushe Wright) whose role in the film is largely superfluous allowing Whistler to explain Blade to the audience through her.
Some of the action sequences and set pieces hold up better than others (personally the club blood bath doesn’t hold up although the Robot Chicken parody is quite amusing, and the film does succeed in selling audiences on the character of Blade leading to a pair of sequels (one of which is actually pretty good). The film is a so-so introduction to the character more notable for the films it would influence than itself.
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