Critic Reviews

A pulsing, wooshing, visceral experience that amounts to great fun and an entirely disposable movie.

Blade is just good, plain action movie fun. It runs like a smooth roller-coaster and has excellent replay value.

Blade is an entertainingly macabre and excitingly staged action horror, with a propulsive energy and a prototype “bullet time” sequence one year before the Wachowskis made it famous in The Matrix.

Wesley 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.

Big 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.

Blade 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.

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.

"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.

By 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.

Blade doesn't manage to work up a whole lot of suspense.