'Blade' -- Snipes' performance a cut above the rest

"Blade," the New Line film based on the Marvel Comics character, captures the dark mood of other recent comic book adaptations, such as "Batman," "The Crow" and "Spawn," but also crosses over into the currently popular vampire genre.

The movie quickly establishes Blade's origin, showing his birth just after his mother has been bitten by a vampire. It then flashes forward three decades, finding Blade invading a vampire nightclub and using his martial arts skills to dispatch the bloodsucking crowd in a literal bloodbath.

Director Stephen Norrington utilizes all of Snipes' martial arts abilities, with special effects used to depict Blade's superhuman strength and speed, due to his half-vampire nature.

In addition to his fighting skills, Blade uses a variety of unique weapons designed to kill vampires. Besides his trademark sword, Blade uses silver spikes to drive through the hearts of vampires, silver bullets filled with garlic, an ultraviolet lantern for giving vampires a nasty sunburn and an S-shaped bladed boomerang useful for decapitating vampires at a distance.

The film's visual effects are first-rate, showing vampires dissolving into dust and adding a feeling of reality to the fantastic premise of the film.

Between the action and visual effects, "Blade" also has a plot.

Deacon Frost, played by Stephen Dorff, is Blade's arch-nemesis, a vampire intent on raising the spirit of La Magra, the blood god, which will give Frost the power to rule the world, and turn the entire population into vampires.

Blade has help from his mentor Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), who designs vampire-killing weapons for him, and Karen Jenson (N'bushe Wright), a hematologist whom Blade rescues from a not-so-dead vampire in the city morgue. Together they battle Frost's vampire minions and prevent his plot for world domination.

Like other vampire films, the familiar rules about sunlight, garlic, and silver apply to killing vampires, but the vampires in "Blade" are more fleshed-out as an underground society. They have an organized crime syndicate, paying off corrupt politicians and cops to do their bidding in the world of the humans, and they have the history of their race contained in a huge mainframe computer library.

Also, the upper class of vampires is ruled by those who were born vampires, while Frost, who was turned into a vampire by a bite, is considered a half-breed -- not a "pure" vampire. This leads to conflict between Frost and the vampire bosses of the city.

While based on a comic book, "Blade's" continual violence, gore and language are definitely not for children. This R-rated film is a considerable improvement from Marvel Comics' only previous big-screen adaptation, "Howard the Duck." If "Blade" is successful, maybe Marvel will finally get around to producing the long-awaited Spider-Man movie.

With Snipes' fighting skills, cutting-edge visual effects, a good supporting cast and a pulse-pounding soundtrack, "Blade" earns four out of five stars.