Movie Review: Blade (1998)

Blade

Often, when people talk about superhero movies, they talk about how it went into a really bizarre 'dork age' phase when the likes of Batman Forever, Batman & Robin and Superman IV hit the theaters in the late 80's and early 90's, and then crediting X-Men and Spider-Man for reinvigorating a more serious, but still fun and faithful, take to the comic book movies, further reinforced in subsequent years when the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Nolan Batman movies proved themselves to be commercial and critical successes. 

But Blade came out in 1998, two full years before X-Men. And it was... okay! It was pretty dang good. I'm not going to pretend that I know a lot about Blade a s a character, how he's supposed to be like, whether this is a faithful adaptation of the character, et cetera. I'm not very good on Marvel  comics lore, with my only real experience regarding the Marvel universe outside of the movies being the Marvel: Ultimate Alliance game. Blade was a playable character there, but beyond being a vampire hunter I knew nothing about that.

But the movie doesn't waste our time. We quickly get a backstory to Blade's origin stories (a mother bitten by a vampire gives birth to a child that's a Daywalker, as the vampire community calls him) and we're then thrown headlong to a time period when a fully grown Blade, played here by the amazing Wesley Snipes, is a hunter of his own kind, blowing people up while looking awesome with a leather jacket, a dapper haircut and sunglasses, swinging around silver swords, shooting people with silver-bullet shotguns and reducing them to burning skeletons. Which, yes, might look a little suspect now that we've got far better CGI in a TV show, but eh.

The plot's simplistic, of course. After establishing the setting (vampires go to raves, and there's an ancient council that's prejudiced against non-purebloods), establishing our leading characters Blade, love interest slash audience-surrogate dr. Karen Jenson, and mentor Abraham Whistler, we establish our main villain, one Deacon Frost, who's like this classy vampire gangster boss, and his main mook (whose hands keep getting sliced off by Blade) Quinn, played here by Donal Logue, better known to viewers of Gotham as the actor who would play Harvey Bullock. Deacon Frost wants Blade's unique blood to help him complete a ritual which would transform him into La Magra, the vampiric blood god. And that's more or less what you need to know. 

The rest of the movie is just a whole lot of vampire shooting, with Blade unleashing a crapton of hurt on the vampires. The movie itself is serviceable, but very, very solid. We get a perfunctory love interest between Blade and Karen, we get somewhat of a character arc with Blade trying to find his purpose and the completely hurt look he has on his face when he finds out his mother has been turned into Frost's thrall, we get a couple of awesome world-building courtesy of things like vampire raves, the council of Erebrus or things like the vampire bible...  there's the very weird dude, Pearl the record-keeper, who is this fat, screechy-voiced thing that makes Snorlax look lean in comparison. There's the sub-plot of Karen trying to find a cure, both for herself and for Blade's worsening condition and resistance to a serum injection to help him control his bloodlust.

And I do love how the show builds up on the mythology while never being too burdened by it. There's a sense of weight between the scenes that Deacon Frost and his rival on the Council of Erebus, Dragonetti, about tradition, about purebloods and half-bloods, even if it doesn't really matter to our hero specifically. 

Of course, it's not the best superhero movie now, not with titans like the Dark Knight or Captain America: the Winter Soldier to compete with. It's an action flick first and a superhero flick second, and there are some gory bits and cuss words that are thrown around that I honestly didn't expect this movie to have. "Motherfucker, are you out of your damn mind?" is just one of the many hilarious one-liners that Blade has to say, and I find that beyond the simplistic plotline and a flat villain in Deacon Frost (Quinn is far more charismatic, and that's before I realized who his actor was), it's actually a freaking enjoyable movie. There's a certain level of B-movie quality to be expected, yes, but the movie is so slick and bereft of padding, yet at the same time it's not a clinical, emotionless picture either with just enough scenes to make you care about Blade as a character instead of just a lean badass vampirekilling machine.

So yeah, I enjoyed myself a lot more than I expected when watching this movie, and I really should start checking out superhero movies before the big titanic explosion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its contemporaries..