#15 — Blade
This is an illustrated countdown of my 49 1/2 most essential action movies. We’re down to the last 15! This is the special stuff they don’t make in the factory, you gotta find someone at the docks and ask “do you have the stuff?” and then he hands you a brown paper bag filled with steelbook cases hardwired with roundhouse kicks laced with capsaicin. Please watch responsibly. Last week I talked about an action power fantasy that might be real, Total Recall.
There are two types of people in this world; those who try to ice skate uphill, and those that take the ski lift. I’ve heard people suggest that Blade’s homespun wisdom doesn’t make any sense, but I think I heard Harry Callahan say the same thing right before he watched a crooked police lieutenant get blown up. “A man’s got to know his limitations”. Of course ice skating uphill doesn’t make any sense, that’s why everybody that tries it ends up with a twisted ankle and a pair of busted skates — or in Donal Logue’s case, a missing arm. What is so hard to understand here?
Anyways, I just think it’s cool that they made an action movie about ice skating. A lot of people don’t know that. It’s sort of like how folks don’t realize the cult Christmas classic “Die Hard” is actually an action movie. But I’ve read up on this stuff and the information is there. The movie is titled after the main character — a man that knows his limitations, along with everyone else’s. That’s why he can walk into a blood rave and smile at whoever is going to come in second place. Everyone fears his ability to triple axel his way through a crowd of rave dancing vampires. His arsenal is one of elegance, power, and precision.
His rival is Deacon Frost — a bratty ice queen with Spice Girl bangs and a bad attitude. Sort of the Tara Lipinski* to Blade’s Kristi Yamaguchi. He wants to be number one, but he doesn’t respect the rules or the training. He doesn’t want to put in the work. He lives in a gated community surrounded by wealth, but can’t accept his flaws or weaknesses. He also gives an interesting speech about eugenics, touching on some of the more subtler themes you wouldn’t expect to see in a movie about vampire figure skaters caught up in a blood feud. This movie has layers, or as Blade puts it, “sugar coated toppings” — separating perception from reality.
*upon publishing this essay, I reached out to Tara and the Lipinski family to make it clear that I was simply drawing a parallel to competitive figure skating rivalries — and, as far as I know, she is not a murderer or a vampire racist.
Stephen Dorff provides one of the great villains of the 90s. He has this privileged rich kid energy and palpable disdain for everyone that somehow feels as authentic as it does silly. I’ve seen great actors like Guy Pearce radiate this kind of snark, but not without feeling like parody. Dorff somehow channels the varsity jock persona of teen comedies into an action (sports) movie villain and it makes him more threatening. The immaturity of that archetype combined with the power of an actual monster makes him pretty formidable.
There’s a great scene where one of his elders, Dragonetti (what a terrific name) is lecturing on the importance of their heritage, and Frost just tunes him out while techno music blares from his headphones. He has no interest in the old man’s words because he’s going to kill him anyways. He wants to use some kind of ancient, vampiric steroid to elevate his race, and maybe win some Olympic gold on the side. Frost and his goons eventually have him melted, a cruel fate for a skater. Frost is a diabolical jerk who thinks ancient rituals can make him not only a better skater than Blade, but genetically superior to the entire pool of competition.
This is where that old adage comes into focus, raising an important truth about society. Ice skating uphill is a big problem in our world. Being an actual living human, you have definitely noticed this almost every day of your life. Ice skating uphill at work. Ice skating uphill on a date. Ice skating uphill in the classroom. Ice skating uphill on the basketball court. Ice skating uphill while trying to transform into a genetically enhanced vampire so you can kill the Daywalker. Look, we all want to be our own blood god, but man makes plans and La Magra laughs.
Before Blade’s final performance, he gets Tonya Harding’d and has to be rescued by his team doctor, Karen. Things are pretty rigged against him, but you can’t stop a guy named Blade from doing what he was born for. The music kicks in with some kind of Mortal Kombat tune and he starts right away with mixing props into his routine — severed arms, sunglasses, and syringes of precious serum. Snipes has so much style it isn’t fair. He’s been heel pointing, pivoting, and spiking vampire heads through the ceiling the whole movie, but he really lets loose for the finale.
There’s a level of showmanship here, both in the acting and the editing, that feels in tune with martial arts, dance, and theater. I appreciate realism and I don’t want everything to be the same, but Blade feels pretty close to the end of an era — and we should honor what that era did well. It also features a leading role as iconic as Christopher Reeve’s Superman.
Snipes has to be considered one of the better physical performers in the genre — not just for his fighting ability, but for his screen awareness and natural charisma, the sense of how to move for the camera and an audience, the way his body language and posture communicate so much more than mere technique. I don’t how you combine the swagger of a runway model with the aggression of Sonny Chiba, but I think this is what that looks like. There’s a broadly theatrical way he yells “FROOOOOST!” in between stomping on a vampire, but he also daintily shoves bodies out of his way and twirls his sword just as the music stops.
None of this, on paper, feels like it should work. If you tried it today, it might be received ironically because people no longer seem capable of processing such things with sincerity. It’s a weird mix of techno, one-liners, karate, bullet time, primitive CGI, and some sort of practical/stop-motion looking fx hybrid that makes exploding vampires look like something out of a Don Coscarelli movie. It’s a miracle on ice.
The movie ends with Blade traveling to Moscow, where it’s cold and snowy. The skate scene is pretty good there, I bet. It’s a great ending. They tried to make a sequel that was sort of the Aliens to Blade’s Alien (a business decision I always respect), but they didn’t called it “Blades”. Big mistake. It’s very good, but you can only make one Blade. Everything after that is gonna be Blade II: Cruise Control or Blade 3: The Best A Man Can Get. But I think this is the best a Blade can get. I don’t know how you out-skate this one, it’s an uphill battle.
