Jack of Harts

With the upcoming run of the much-touted “First Black Superhero Movie” from Marvel/Disney, I’ve been going back and watching some of the superhero movies from yesteryear. Wild Wild West. Yeah, I know, not really a superhero movie, but I was looking for Hancock and found it. And I have yet to see the Will Smith movie I didn’t like, so I took one from the Gipper and watched it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Then I watched Catwoman, and enjoyed it as well. Not as much, and I had more issues with it, but Halle Berry is a talented actress, so it was a good time overall. Today, with so many other people focusing on the season finale of football, I was thinking about something else.

Blade. Yes, the movie about the half-vampire/half-human vampire hunter and general sorta-dogooder taken from the pages of Marvel comics and dropped onto the big screen via the acting talent of Wesley “Tax Dodger” Snipes. I’ve never watched it before, and now that I have I can see how it rests in the annals of superhero movies. It came in at the end of the original Batman movie series, and borrowed the over-the-top stoicism of the titular hero from that franchise. And it came out before the first X-Men film, which shared Blade’s serious, world ending stakes should things go badly. Heh. I said stakes, about a vampire hunting film. 😉

Let me be clear. Blade earns its R rating with orgasmic amounts of blood, limb-chopping and body-exploding violence nearly from beginning to end, and F-bombs galore. I’m betting it skirted the edges of what that rating actually allowed, especially twenty years ago. It also sports a lead character with stoic manliness and few words, a villain with delusions of grandeur, and wise-cracking sidekicks for both of them that end up being both fun to watch and impressively effective combatants in their own rights.

This is not a family movie, in the vein of the new MCU movies with Iron Man and Friends. I’m glad I saw it, but it probably won’t make it onto my repeat-watch list. I prefer more family-friendly fare, but I’ll give it one sword up as a moderately enjoyable film to watch. The enemies gave a satisfying thump as they hit the floor as one of my favorite characters in TV once said. And I did watch a lot of Buffy and Angel in my younger days, so I do enjoy watching a good vampire hunt. There was much to like about this film, even as some of the “special effects” are clearly showing their age.