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75Wesley Snipes understands the material from the inside out and makes an effective Blade because he knows that the key ingredient in any interesting superhero is not omnipotence, but vulnerability.
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75Big as it is, Blade' is meticulous and subtle, not just in its camera technique but in the way it works its themes and creates a mood.
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63By the time the film is well into its second hour, we begin to wonder whether there's ever going to be a variation on the carnage and mayhem. As it turns out, there isn't.
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50For most of its two-hour running time it simply flings a barrage of horrors at the audience, enhanced with the most imaginative science-fiction atmospherics this side of "Dark City," which incidentally was a far more original picture.
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50Director Stephen Norrington is more keen on finding new ways to explode the fiends... than developing a credible story. So the movie flits from one gore-laden assault to another with little suspense.
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38If only it wasn't such bloody nonsense.
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30The few good lines go to Kristofferson and the ever-amusing Kier, but Snipes's considerable energy is buried under an affectless, Terminator-style demeanor.
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67"Interview With the Vampire" it's not, but marginally thrilling nonetheless, and besides, any film that features a house party in which the ceiling-mounted fire extinguishers expel freshets of crimson goo in place of H2O gets my vote.
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The action involves lots of second-rate martial-arts choreography (made even less thrilling by the video's pan-and-scan job), while the psychological conflicts are filled with unconvincing angst.
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70Blade in no way resembles a good movie, but its combination of music-video bombast, goth-rock sensibility, high-tech industrial production design, cold-blooded glossy magazine visuals, high-fashion club culture, horror movies, blaxploitation movies, Hong Kong movies and comic-book nihilism make it diverting trash.
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Sure, the story is pretty standard, and the dialogue is laughable or worse. But creative cinematography and non-stop, decently choreographed gratuitous violence make watching this comic-book movie—Blade is a minor, almost-forgotten Marvel comic—entertaining.
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60Blade's stomach-turning special effects, bone-crunching martial arts and cynical humor will more than satisfy any action-film addict's need for a fix of eye-popping escapist adrenaline.
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50The noir atmosphere doesn't quite smother the dialogue's cheesy smell.
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40Although the opening scene suggests a dark urban satire, Blade quickly turns into a cartoonish futuristic action-adventure yarn in which Blade is the only thing keeping humanity from being exterminated by vampires in a hematological holocaust.
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40Though slick and diverting in some aspects, increasingly silly pic has trouble meshing disparate elements --- horror, superhero fantasy, straight-up action --- into a workable whole.
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30A vulgar attempt to revamp the undead genre by introducing computer-generated splatter and a casketful of themes from genetic tinkering to conspiracy theories.
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Adapted from the Marvel Comics series, this movie lacks the mournfulness that sustains a good horror strip; it's trashy, but too deafening and invasive to have the appeal of good pulp.
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20Working from a script by David S. Goyer ("Dark City") that lacks any sense of humor or character, Snipes seems unsure if he should vamp it up or play it straight, while Dorff just plain sucks.
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63Blade doesn't manage to work up a whole lot of suspense.
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38Often ridiculous, mostly poorly written and, surprisingly poorly acted too. No matter how many flashy scenes the filmmakers shoot, the bad lines just keep dripping down. [21 Aug 1998]
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Pure hackwork.
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80A pulsing, wooshing, visceral experience that amounts to great fun and an entirely disposable movie.
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50At best, second-rate pulp, hampered by excessive length, a thematically meandering screenplay, and a general lack of excitement.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 10 out of 13
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Mixed: 3 out of 13
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Negative: 0 out of 13
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TysonB.10The start of something great.