The Marvel Movie Scale - Blade (1998)

I’ve been wanting to do this for a long while now, back when I was updating ADH at least once a month, but single movie reviews never felt right there. You’ll notice that whenever we did do movie reviews it was a list of a few at a time and more of a recommendation system. Then of course my life got a little more complicated with the whole getting a real job, getting married, and buying a home thing which all led to not having enough time to maintain the necessary upkeep on ADH.
(NOTE: Katie, hon, when you read this know that I’m not blaming you for its death. ADH was a really fun ride and all but obviously I was also growing out of it )

Having some downtime now and I figured I’d finally do it, review every single Marvel movie released ‘till now. I have to wait ‘till May for Iron Man, and then a few more months ‘till Incredible Hulk and Punisher: War Zone, so I should have time to get caught up with all of them by the end of the year.

You may be asking, “Luke, just what is this Marvel Movie Scale you talk about?” Well even if that’s not what you’re thinking, I’ll tell you. I rank my Marvel Movies on a scale of 0 to 10, while it may seem strange that I would start at 0 instead of 1 you have to understand that so far the only movie to get a 0 is Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four (1994), a movie so bad that even I can’t watch it all in one sitting. As a contrast to that the first movie to reach 10 is Spider-Man, so while telling may spoil your expectations of my review of Spider-Man you now have an idea how just how the scale works.

I’ll be going in chronological order here so you’ll notice a pattern once I reach sequels. I’ve decided to first judge each sequel by its own merit and then do a review of how it fits in with the previous movie(s). Oh, and I will not be doing the made for TV movies such as Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. staring The Hoff, no matter how fun it would be to review.

So let’s do this thing!

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BLADE (1998)
In 1998 Marvel started its foray into big budget action movies with the surprise hit, Blade, but at the time hardly anybody knew it was based on a comic character let alone one owned by Marvel. I can recall several times of people being shocked when I mentioned it while naming all of the Marvel movies currently released. Two things defend this:

1) Blade was never really popular before the movie. He was created in the 70’s and was a little black-sploitationish and actually started out as a human only much later in the 90’s being turned into a hybrid of sorts after being bitten by Deacon Frost.

2) Considering the lack of spandex and a story revolving around vampires instead of a standard super villain it’s easy to understand why people wouldn’t think it to be based on a comic (see 300 and Sin City).

Directed by Stephen Norrington and written by David Goyer, Blade was dark and realistic looking, almost feeling like it had no budget and therefore needed to rely on pre-built sets to film on. The story was also straight forward: a group of eviler than normal vampire punks are sick of the old ways and want to take over the world by releasing an ancient vampire god. Standing in their way is the good guy who happens to be a freak of nature that shares their strengths. Not a whole lot of surprises with manipulative governments or being unsure of who the bad guy is. Just here’s the good guy(s) and here’s the bad guys. Then they threw in some awesome fight scenes, the first one in a blood soaked rave party is to this day one of my favorite fight scenes ever, with Blade just showing up in the middle of the crowd and without saying anything just proceeds to wipe out every vampire that he can.

Even with some very predictable plot elements, my only real complaint is of N'Bushe Wright. The human caught in the middle that seems to be there to give us someone to relate to, but her acting is just way too wooden for me to care. On the plus side the character in general didn’t feel forced in there, though near the end her presence felt a little too dues ex machina for my liking as right when the bad guys look like they’re going to win, she is able to free Blade and let him drink from her (because she trusts him) to regain his strength and save the day. But again aside from her acting just alienating me, any problem I have with the movie is nitpicking.

Marvel Movie Scale = 8

Why That?: The rating has nothing to do with the drastic character change from the comics because nobody cared about that, to me it just felt like a good action movie and for my part, good action movies rarely rate higher than 8.