Blade

DesertDogMedia

Title: Blade

Directed by: Stephen Norrington

Storyline: We start off in a hospital with a pregnant woman being rushed in while covered in blood. She goes into labour while the doctors and nurses are trying to treat her, they perform a C section to take the child out. We are then introduced to a CONI (Character of no importance) as him and a vampire are driving through the city to get to a vampire nightclub/rave. But just as Blade shows up the music and sprinklers stop as everyone realizes that Blade has crashed their party, one guy tries to take him on but is shot with a silver spike before making it past the crowd. Blade opens fire on the ravers and starts killing them all one by one, until he runs out of ammo. This is where the other toys come into play. We see Quinn get set on fire regardless. He is then taken to the morgue where his kills another CONI and injures a main character, who Blade then saves. In the next scene we are introduced to what looks like the hierarchy of vampires along with the movies antagonist, Deacon Frost. We also get to hear Blades backstory as told by Whistler when Karen finds out that he is a hybrid. The next scene shows us Frost and his men taking out the head vampire by binding his limbs together and leaving him to be killed by the sun rise while they stay protected by their motorcycling suits and helmets. Frost than finds Blade's base and beats down and bites Whistler while kidnapping Karen, Blade then comes back to this and Whistler begs him to kill him, but Blade cannot do it, so he hands Whistler the gun to do it himself. Blade is then captured after being beaten down, so him and Karen are then taken to ritual site where the vampire hierarchy are place in their positions and Blade's blood is drawn for the ritual and it begins as Karen is able to escape. This comes to the fight scene that really shows off Blade's fighting skill, along with the fact that all of these moves were performed by Wesley Snipes without the use of doubles or anything as he is training in various forms of marshal arts. Blade kills Frost in the final show down fight and this ends the movie, but in these scenes you can tell that it is a stunt double, especially in the slow motion scenes.

Acting: Wesley Snipes was perfect as Blade because he was able to pull off the stern, distant and emotionless expressions when he needed to, but was also able to give the character emotion when he needed to. His knowledge of marshal art also helped him out in this sense. Stephen Dorff as Deacon Frost, he played the suave calculating vampire role to a T, not much else that can be said.

Noticeable Camera work: The fight scenes for the rave scene are well choreographed and do not contain any BS shaky cam, so you can actually see what is happening and what moves are being used. A good example of camera work is one of the shots where Blade kills one guy and spins around to punch another straight in the face, but all we see is him punching the camera at first, but the next shot shows that we were looking for the POV of a vampire, or a vampire henchmen to be exact as he doesn't turn to ash straight away and has his head kicked into the lights and then turns to ash. We also get a good 360 shot when he uses his silver boomerang blade which the camera follows all the way around. We are given another camera punch shot in the hospital scene when Blade comes back to finish Quinn off. The movie does like its establishing shots of buildings, and it is able to pull them off with style in a way so they do not feel over used. The driving scenes are also very fond of using vignette tracking shots for when they're inside the industrial area and voyeuristic shots for when Karen is sneaking around Blade's base. But in the end fight scene with Frost that is made up to use by them giving us a wide range of shots we haven't seen used in the fighting context such as shot reverse shot, birds eye shots, perfectly executed 180º panning shots and worms eye shots.

Costume: In Blade's first appearance in the movie we are treated to a tilting shot of his costume going from his boots, past his chest plate and to his neck. The all black leather works quite well in contrast to the silver buckles on his chest plate, his whole theme revolves around black and silver. Overall Feel: The move is a 2 hour epic, there may be slower scenes in the movie, but they do not feel like slower scenes, they do not break the pacing in the movie. Blade is a movie which you wouldn't expect to be a superhero movie, but it is. Because Blade is owned by Marvel, but feels nothing like a superhero movie. This movie was Marvel's foothold in the cinematic universe as all other popular superhero movies were primarily DC, and the two movies that contained Marvel character didn't have movie releases and were just so the relevant studios could keep the rights to them in one case. This movie perfectly blended action with a good narrative and it was made even better thanks to the cinematographer and stunt organizer who made fight scenes visually stunning to the Nth degree. Like any good movie, it has its problems like some vampires turning to ash when they were killed without silver and such, but apart from that the movie is a great movie to watch and has great re-watch value added to it.

score 8/10

DesertDogMedia 2 July 2014

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3043315/