![[ Loading: Still from film ]](/film/images/blade5.jpg)
Despite its shadowy apparitions and undead souls, BLADE is about as gothic as Kermit the frog. Monica Lewinsky is more gothic than BLADE. My Kao Biore Pore Pack is more gothic than BLADE.
Instead, think of BLADE as techno-fused digitalia, sort of like MORTAL KOMBAT meets HELLRIDER, with a cursory science-fiction gloss and sans the psychological baggage.
Unlike MORTAL KOMBAT, though, BLADE is elegant. Depending on the mood, the availability of snacks and the degree to which one enjoys monotonous thudding bass beats in one's soundtracks, one might even notice the distinct absence of credible dialogue only towards the end. And by then, there is the possibility that one might be too sold to care.
BLADE, a Marvel comic turned blockbuster hopeful by New Line Cinema, is cool. Like all good science fiction it mounts an interesting ideology, but like most badly written films, the ideas behind the characters and situations aren't conveyed with much clarity.
Blade, played by the magnificently muscled Wesley Snipes, is the child of a woman who was bitten by a vampire. She dies in childbirth but her baby's umbilical cord is cut before he becomes fully infected. The child inherits vampirical strengths and instincts, but remains a human, with emotions. Not surprisingly, he makes a point of disembowelling all the vampires he meets as a kind of revenge, aided by Whistler, a mentor and sidekick of sorts. The latter comes accross as a senior Hell's Angel type (Kris Kristofferson with flowing white beard and gut). But he also just happens to be ... a scientist! He produces and administers a serum that regularly tames Blade's vampirical instincts.
The arch villain is a superbly backlit Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff), an ambitious "half blood" (bet you didn't know there was a hierachy to these undeads) who wants to flood the world with vampires. He's kind of an equal opportunity vampire. His pushiness annoys the old-school vampire rulers, snobby, mafia-like "pure bloods" (that is, they were born vampires, unlike Deacon, who was "turned") who want instead to control the human world from the sidelines. And so, before you can say "Keanu Reeves forever ruined vampire mythology for me" there's all kinds of anarchy in the world of the undead.
The main problem with BLADE is that its ideas never really germinate. Despite a detailed apparatus of richly exploitable characters and emotional situations, director Norrington is more interested in choreography and angles than exploring the story's gothic seeds. The character of Blade is half nether-being and half human, a potential metaphor for all sorts of yummy "Jekyll and Hyde" analogies, along with a number of racial and social implications. The draculean network of nightmarish creatures that inhabit society and live amongst normal people is another "we are the beast" doodad Tim Burton would never have thrown away. Equally interesting is "they walk amongst us" thread forwarded by the fact that the vampires appear to have tacit and powerful arrangements with human legal and state authorities. Then there's that juicy Oedipal element that one can't really talk about without a spoiler alert. Suffice to say that Blade has blood connections to Frost in more ways than one.
For the most part, BLADE is a relentless string of graceful battle scenes strung together with the barest minimum of conversation. There are times when even the slick, dance-like movements of the stonily silent Snipes fail to raise the film above thoughtless, unimaginative posturing. The opening sequence, in which Traci Lords, the only person in the film one buys as a vampire, initiates her terrified date into the thrills of modern vampire social gatherings, sets a truly demonic pace that the film never lives up to.
![[ Loading: Still from film ]](/film/images/blade4.jpg)
