Blade

365 Films

Entry #130

Blade (1998)

Directed by Stephen Norrington

Combining two genres that are seemingly indestructible at the box-office these days, Blade release in the waning days of August 1998 seems more prophetic today than it ever could have seemed back then.  For one thing, vampire films were often relegated to the B-Movie horror bin from which, the likes of later John Carpetner and earlier Robert Rodriguez often found refuge.  For another, comic book films had just been dealt a debilitating set back only one year prior with the release of Batman and Robin, a film that possesses the dubious distinction of simultaneously killing that Batman series and big time comic book adaptations for the next couple of years.  Seen from that perspective, Blade seems like Marvel’s attempt to quietly dip their toe in the cinematic waters to check the popular temperature.  For one thing, Blade is certainly not a marquee character in the Marvel universe by any stretch of the imagination and casting Wesley Snipes, whose career was already on the downslide (to be somewhat resuscitated by the Blade films, only to be subsequently terminated by his legal troubles) was definitely a bit of a gamble.  The chronology of events that followed led to the release of X-Men two years later and the rest as they say, is history.  I’m not enough of a film, comic book, or comic book film historian to present a coherent thesis naming Blade as the grandfather of ALL modern day comic-book adaptations, but it certainly played a part.  What Blade lacks in popularity and hype it certainly makes up for in its freedom from the rules of comic book films, to which every other seems to be slavishly devoted.  It’s R-rated; it’s violent and bloody (albeit cartoonishly so) yet re-created on a scale that is almost endearingly modest.  Blade also represents an interesting crossroads in American action cinema at that point in time, coming only a few months after Dark City and a few months prior to The Matrix.  The full-on influence of Hong-Kong cinema and Japanese animation into mainstream Hollywood was about to reach its boiling point with Blade.  I can’t believe I’ve gotten this far into this particular entry without mentioning the presence of Blade himself, Wesley Snipes.  While tamping down his natural charisma for the part, Snipes reigns supreme as a physical presence.  I remember so vividly, the emotional experience of watching the first fight scene in the film between Blade and the hoard of clubbing vampires, that experience went something like: “holy shit, Snipes is back and kicking supreme ass.”  While he definitely chooses to make Blade something of a cipher, it’s still a cipher intriguing enough to never come across as the chiseled statues we get nowadays passing as superheroes.  Blade is always human, he just chooses not to tell us how he’s feeling every ten seconds, he also clearly enjoys what he does and that goes a long way.  Plus, who would have thought one of the best buddy duos to emerge from comic book cinema would have been Kris Kristofferson and Wesley Snipes?  I’m just happy to even write those two names in the same sentence.  Blade is emblematic of a time when film adaptations of comic books (or graphic novels) were relegated to a select group of audience members and not the mass movie-going audience as a whole.  It’s not for me to say whether or not that’s a sound financial strategy in the long run, but I will hold films like Blade and The Crow more near and dear to my heart than anything that’s been released since the great Marvel deluge of ’08.  Stripped down and small scale while retaining the stylistic richness of comic books, Blade represents to confluence of the two mediums at their best.