Viking Night: Blade
By Bruce Hall
April 14, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Traci Lords and Lemmy from The Shield walk into a bar. The bartender is all, “What’ll you have?” Traci says, “Blood and murder!” The bartender turns on the sprinkler system, which sprays blood all over the dance floor. Before anyone knows what’s happening. Wesley Snipes shows up with a shotgun and a bunch of knives and murders everyone in the room except beloved character actor Donal Logue, who is left pinned to a wall, screaming and on fire, and poor Lemmy, covered with blood and probably a little embarrassed at missing a shot with Traci Lords. While all this is happening, Junkie XL is dropping mad beats in the background.
Ladies and gentlemen, THAT is how you start an action movie.
It’s also not lost on me that the fight scenes throughout Blade are wonderfully choreographed near masterpieces, somewhat reminiscent of what we’d see in The Matrix a year later. I don’t know for sure whether one inspired the other, but let’s just say that Blade, if nothing else, is a fantastically stylish film with a great sense of humor and a strong sense of economy. In fact, with the astonishing success of Deadpool this past February (February!), the time seems right to revisit one of its spiritual ancestors - another raunchy, R-rated superhero flick that also probably should have failed, but didn’t.
If you’re not in the know, the premise behind the story is that Blade (Wesley Snipes) was born half-human, half-vampire, on account of his mother having been bitten while she was pregnant with him. She died at birth, leaving her son with a whole lot of really cool superpowers, and a burning desire to rain vengeance on the bloodsucking freak who orphaned him. Blade boasts the same super strength and hyper aggressive dental work as other vampires, but unlike the full blooded variety, Blade can tolerate the sunlight. For years, he and his grizzled partner Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) have used these abilities - along with an endless assortment of guns, knives and gadgets - to battle the undead wherever they can be found.
The backdrop to all this will be suspiciously familiar to fans of the Underworld franchise. Vampires exist in the shadows as part of a secret society, complete with elaborately arcane rituals and bizarre codes of conduct. They also secretly run the world, having bartered an uneasy truce with humans, with one side not wanting to exterminate its food supply, and the other not wanting to...well...be exterminated. But now, an ambitious upstart named Frost (Stephen Dorff) wants to upset the order and enslave humanity under some kind of Soylent Green-esque undead apocalypse. And he’s betting on an ancient vampire prophecy to make it happen.
The only catch for Blade is that in order to keep himself from turning into a full vampire, he’s required to periodically take a special serum that allows him to control the change. I won’t spoil whether or not this ever becomes a critical plot point. And have you already guessed that Frost’s Prophecy somehow involves Blade? And that the two characters share a very special, very dangerous connection that will culminate with an epic fistfight at the climax of the film? Look, just about every beat in this story follows a pretty standard action movie template, and nothing happens onscreen that you won’t have guessed five minutes in advance. But this ultimately serves as a benefit - as I said earlier, Blade is a wonderfully economical experience, and every aspect of it gets converted into momentum. It just never stops being fun long enough for you to care that it makes no sense whatsoever.
And the best part about this is that I’m pretty sure the film knows exactly what it’s doing! Take that opening fight scene. I’m not sure what I love more. Is it the way all rank and file vampires are between the ages of 18 and 35 with perfect abs and professionally styled hair? Is it that there are hundreds of tire irons literally hanging EVERYWHERE, for no other purpose than to be available when a fight breaks out? There’s just enough substance to cover the basics, but make no mistake - style is everything here. Absolutely EVERYTHING about Blade is a feast for the senses, and it has the good sense to knowingly poke fun at itself once in a while. The aforementioned Donal Logue hams it up as one of Frost’s minions, having a good time with the Unkillable Henchman trope, for instance.
The best example of this movie’s confidence is probably Frost himself. When the head of the Vampire Council (Udo Kier) first calls on Frost to deal with Blade, they treat him a pizza boy who showed up an hour late with a cold pie. And it’s a wonder they treat him so contemptuously because apparently, he’s the only one of them with the perfect combination of super-smart and badass necessary to take Blade out. But it’s not immediately clear why Frost even bothers to get involved, and it’s not even clear why they fear him. He just shows up sneering and smoking a cigarette, therefore he is badass. While he’s researching the Prophecy, we see him still sneering, still smoking a cigarette, staring at a computer screen but not really doing anything.
Look - Frost is awesome because he smokes cigarettes, wears cool clothes and has a computer. Is that okay with you? Blade can walk around in broad daylight dressed like the Terminator, waving around Robocop’s gun with a samurai sword sticking out of his jacket and not draw any attention to himself. Why? Because he, too, is awesome. For God’s sake, Blade’s love interest (N'Bushe Wright) is a goddamn phlebotomist who also happens to be hot, and also, apparently, knows kung fu. Yes, it's all kind of dumb, but it's self-consciously, energetically, efficiently dumb.
If that bothers you, I have no idea why you’re even watching. Did you look at the picture of Wesley Snipes in the sunglasses, with the leather trench coat and the katana before you pressed play? What were you expecting? But don't take my enthusiasm as a frivolous endorsement. Blade is not incidentally fun, in a “so good it's bad” kind of way. It's a meticulously crafted, visually arresting experience that's specifically designed to deliver maximum bang for the buck.
None of the characters themselves are particularly original. Kristofferson pulls off a passable white trash Morgan Freeman, Snipes carries himself like the bulletproof ‘90s action hero he was, and Frost is such a pretentious douche you're rooting for someone to shoot him in the face almost immediately. But David S Goyer’s (yes, THAT David S Goyer) dialogue is famously snappy, while Stephen Norrington is kind enough to just keep the camera moving and let his actors have fun. Everything and everyone about Blade is all in - even the soundtrack kicks ass - and it's hard not to get caught up in it even as you're rolling your eyes.
And by the way, I'm not sure this comes up often in conversations about Blade, but this film has a VERY fastidious color palette, and may have been an early pioneer in popularizing the teal/orange look that pervades action movies today. The sets, backgrounds, costumes, sound - everything fits together in service of the viscera. Even the CGI, while it tends to stand out, doesn't become a problem until the most important scene in the whole film.
So, it's not perfect. But Blade is still one of the best superhero films of the ‘90s. It holds up well not just on its own terms, but as a great example of how to knock a genre film out of the park. Blade oozes confidence (when Traci Lords is the first person to appear in your film, you are presumably very sure of yourself), trusts you to be in on the joke, and is happy to let you share in the fun. It works on almost every level, and it's easy to see why it still inspires people today.