With all this going on, it's a good thing the humans have Blade (Wesley Snipes) on their side. Aided by grizzled weapons maker Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), Blade goes from town to town wiping out colonies of vampires.
But he seems to have met his match in Frost (Stephen Dorff), a cool-creepy vampire who plans to use Blade in some pagan blood ritual to make Frost all-powerful. To capture Blade, Frost kidnaps his platonic hottie girlfriend, N'Bushe Wright. This leads to a final confrontation between Blade and Frost. The latter gets the upper hand, but we suspect that Blade will get his revenge on both Frost and his uncouth biker-type sidekick, Quinn (Donal Logue).
How others will see it. This purely escapist flick is geared toward action-loving young males eager to see a costumed Batman-like Snipes kick vampire butt, with the help of computer-generated special effects and his courageous (if overly serious) girlfriend. If this is what you want, trust me. It's what you'll get.
How I felt about it. What's missing is the comic relief, or atmosphere of satire, needed to turn this movie into an Evil Dead entry. It also lacks the intensity required to make it like Night of the Living Dead. That's because Blade is not really a horror movie. It's a martial arts movie.
But there are good Kung Fu movies. Enter the Dragon, for one. But Blade is no Enter the Dragon, because the latter succeeds in being cool. Blade is merely there. It passes time, agreeably if so desired, without ever achieving actual interest. The characters seemed warmed over from myriad other movies: the incorruptible, determined, humorless hero and his irredeemable, determined, cynical nemesis. The exploits of each are built up until their inevitable final confrontation, with Life As We Know It at stake. If there are vampires out there, I hope that Blade is on the job dispatching them. I'm just not sure that we need to have a film about it.