Actor Stephen Dorff recently argued to the Daily Beast that Marvel’s new planned film adaptation of Blade (a half-human, half-vampire comic-book character who fights evil vampires) had no chance of outshining the 1998 original. “Marvel is used to me trashing them anyway,” Dorff said, alluding to his past Marvel-critical comments. “How’s that PG ‘Blade’ movie going for you, that can’t get a director? [laughs] Because anybody who goes there is going to be laughed at by everyone, because we already did it and made it the best. There’s no Steve Norrington [director of the first Blade] out there.”
Now, Dorff has a bit of a bias here, as he played Deacon Fronst, the villain of 1998’s Blade, squaring off against the titular hero, memorably played by Wesley Snipes. But he’s also right. As I’ve argued, Blade may be shlock, but it’s good shlock. It works as
both a late-’90s action movie and as unexpectedly modern comic-book escapism (Blade is a Marvel character; this movie came out in 1998, two years before the first X-Men movie and four years before Tobey Maguire swung into our hearts as Spider-Man). Its opening action scene, though marred by some unfortunately dated CGI (also scattered throughout the rest of the movie), is still one for the ages. Moreover, as [Tom] Breihan noted . . . by having trenchcoat-wearing people in sunglasses going around and doing cool things and talking about how the world we see is fake, it beat The Matrix to the punch by a year. (It even beat The Matrix to bullet time!)
It’s helped, of course, by Snipes’s persuasive commitment to the title role. But Dorff’s snarling upstart vampire Frost is engaging as well. In recent years, for no particular reason, I’ve found reason to contemplate his goal in the movie: to overthrow the reigning vampire elite and to install himself at its head, with the ultimate aim of unleashing even more evil and chaos than his predecessors ever managed.
I’m increasingly partial to Dorff’s broader comments about comic-book movies generally, which he derides as “garbage” (occasional standouts such The Dark Knight and Blade excepted). Perhaps I am (belatedly) aging out of their target demographic, but I have been particularly unimpressed with or outright uninterested in Marvel’s offerings of late; it remains my view that Marvel may have peaked. It is very hard to ice-skate uphill forever, after all.