“Staff Picks” is a deeper look into movies that we love here at Video CULTure. Each edition of this column will focus on a single film that we think you should check out, either for the first time or for a long-overdue revisit.
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by Patrick Bartlett (Twitter: @alleywaykrew)
One of the most memorable lines in the 1998 action/horror hybrid “Blade” is one where the title character, played by Wesley Snipes, is asked if he’s a vampire. He replies no, he’s something else. That’s obviously a cool line that sets up the character of Blade, along with his relationship to the world around him… but it’s also a good summation of the film itself.
Before I talk about the film though, I want to talk about comics. These days, Marvel is literally a household name. That wasn’t always the case though. In the mid-to-late 1990s, Marvel was in bankruptcy. I know that sounds crazy but after the speculator bubble burst and all the people that were buying comics in the hope of getting rich were gone, it almost killed comics. Brian Michael Bendis, one of the most prolific writers in comics, started at Marvel around that time and has said that every time he went to Marvel to turn in a script…he was pretty sure he was writing the last Marvel comic ever. Also, at that point, comic book movies weren’t in a much better place. The X-Men and Spider-Man films had yet to arrive and therefore not taken the mainstream populace by storm. The Batman series seemed unstoppable until it ground to a halt after the fairly reviled “Batman & Robin” in ’97. Honestly, that could have been it. It really seems like it should have been. Looking back on it, it seems kind of miraculous that we live in a world where movies about comic book superheroes are currently some of the most successful films of all-time. I think it’s undeniable that it took “Blade” in ’98 to ignite the spark that brought us to where we are now.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve been a comic nerd pretty much since birth. I learned to read with comics. I have the cover of one of the first two books I ever got tattooed on my arm with a myriad of other comic characters tattooed around it. I love comics. That being said, I’m reasonably sure to this day that I’ve only ever read one issue of “Blade” and it didn’t leave much of an impression on me then. When the movie came out, it was a character that I could not have cared less about. The thing that sold me on the movie was that my other lifelong passion was monsters. Everything from the Universal classics to “The Lost Boys” was lifeblood to me as a kid just as much as comics ever were. To me, the hook of “Blade” was it being a vampire movie. I cared far more about that aspect than it being a superhero movie at that point.
To the uninitiated, on the most basic level, “Blade” is a movie about a dude that kills vampires like it’s his job and it basically is. His mother was bitten while he was in utero, he’s delivered before his mother fully has a chance to vamp out and as such, he has all of the vampire abilities. Granted, I’ve never completely understood why vampires have always been shown to have what basically amounts to superpowers. They’re literally just people that should be dead but aren’t. If anything, it seems to me like they should be more like zombies. Anyway, it’s pretty universal that they’re faster and stronger than regular living people and so is Blade. However, while vampires have to stay out of the sunlight to survive, Blade can walk around in the daylight. Hence him being called “The Daywalker” by his vampire prey. To someone like Deacon Frost, a dude with ambitions of being the leader of all the vamps, he’s the goal. Blade is something to be captured, dissected, and studied to replicate his physiology, he has “all of our strengths and none of our weaknesses” according to Frost. Blade has zero interest in anything other than the wholesale destruction of the entire vampire race and therein lies a glorious bloody conflict. Seriously, there’s so much blood.
This seems like an ideal time to talk about the cast. I’ll start unconventionally with the villain of the piece, Deacon Frost himself, played by Stephen Dorff. Dorff is incredible in this movie. The dude has such charisma as Frost that even though Blade is a total badass that it’s kind of impossible not to root for, I feel like you can’t help but support Frost as well and that’s in no small part due to Stephen Dorff’s performance. Say what you want about anything and everything he did after this movie (and it is probably fair) but he is great here. The only reason he doesn’t completely steal the movie is because Wesley Snipes is absolutely perfect as Blade. He’s a hero suited for the time. He’s equal parts knight and ninja. He’s noble but also not afraid to do whatever he has to do to achieve his goal of annihilating vampires, even if that means using a woman he saved as bait to draw out whoever attacked her, for instance. Add to that he’s essentially pioneering a look that took over pop culture a year later with The Matrix and it’s kind of impossible not to want to watch Snipes off vampires with legit martial arts while wearing a black duster and shades. Anyway, your villain and hero anchor the movie beautifully but even people in smaller parts like Donal Logue and Kris Kristofferson, playing second to Frost and Blade respectively steal every scene they’re in. There really is no weak link here. Everyone brings something to keep you entertained even in the parts without glorious action.
That’s all attributed to that cast but also to the director that cast them and helmed those bits with glorious action, Stephen Norrington. This is one of only two films of his I’ve seen and the other is the less than awesome (but still kind of fun, I guess) “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”. He imbues this movie with a style that’s beyond reproach. He manages to keep things moving incredibly fast while also keeping track of everything an audience member needs to follow along. Seriously, for a movie with so much going on, it’s very lean. Just as important though is the writer of the piece, David S. Goyer. This dude’s writing credits are legendary. Hell, he went on to co-write the Dark Knight trilogy after this. On “Blade” though, he managed to weave together a lot of elements that should not have worked but inexplicably do. As I mentioned, it’s a superhero movie but it’s also a monster movie. On paper, that doesn’t seem like it should work. This is a pre-Hellboy world, after all. Goyer credited the fairly obscure Hammer film “Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter” as the primary influence on his script for “Blade” but I feel like that undercuts how original of a film this is. He found imaginative ways to build a world around the character with pseudoscientific explanations for various elements of vampire lore that made it feel like these bloodsuckers could really exist. He took his primary influence and managed to create something that feels very real and he did that from scratch. I really don’t feel like what Goyer did here can be overstated.
“Blade” is in large part responsible for the modern comic book movie. I don’t feel like that’s arguable. If it wasn’t for “Blade”, there wouldn’t be an X-Men franchise or a Spider-Man franchise. There definitely would not be something like “The Avengers”. Even if those movies did exist, they almost certainly would not have been the same. “Blade” was a proof-of-concept that laid the foundation for superheroes that audiences could take seriously. On top of that, it certainly opened up film studios’ minds to the idea of superhero characters other than just cultural icons like Superman and Batman and what their potential could be. “Blade” simply is the seed that everything we take for granted now grew from while also being a really fun movie. It even still holds up well with every comic book film that came out in its wake. It’s not just a superhero movie or a vampire movie. “Blade” is something else.
To find out where this film is available to stream, click here: Just Watch