Blade (1998, Stephen Norrington)

I didn’t intend to watch Blade within a week of The Blade, but when you need a Kris Kristofferson memorial screening in SHOCKtober it’s either this or The Jacket. Snipes and Kris hella cool, perfect genre writing by Goyer, and expensive-looking, New Line’s money put to good use. Wesley’s stunt double gets a good sword fight, even some wire jumping. The hair and music is very 1998 (complimentary) and so is the cutting (derogatory), with judicious use of instantly-dated CG in the finale.

Donal Logue gets set on fire in the first fight and the movie makes a running joke of destroying him over and over. He’s a henchman for sneery Stephen Dorff (who hasn’t been in a good movie since Public Enemies but as the kid from The Gate he will always be a horror prince), who disagrees with vampire lord Udo Kier’s strategy of lurking in the shadows, preferring to rise and enslave humanity. Dorff uses a PowerMac with OS7 to AI-translate the ancient texts to enable his plan.

Meanwhile Blade and Kris gruffly help prevent a hot Donal-victim (N’Bushe Wright of Fresh and Dead Presidents) from vamping out while sleuthing Dorff’s plan. Unfortunately Blade turns out to be the plan, his daywalker-blood required to bring about an apocalypse. Dorff sunrises Kier to death, and bullet-dodges (the year before The Matrix came out). Movie portrays police as the dumbest people on the planet. Norrington went on to direct The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and after that travesty he deservedly never worked again.


Blade II (2002, Guillermo del Toro)

Guillermo’s fourth feature and it’s still showy-expensive, a harsh transition from the practical 1998 to the CG 2002. Worse and less coherent than part 1, more of a horror. The lighting and colors are cooler anyway, but it’s got overstuff’d sequilitis (adding ten new characters and giving short shrift to Snipes-Kristofferson).

The Man:

After a rescue operation, Blade works on rehabilitating vamped Kris, while Kris’s old job is being filled by vamp-spy Scud (Cigarette Burns), a fan of Powerpuff Girls and Krispy Kremes, making me wonder which production designer was from Atlanta. Meanwhile some new immortal vampire-hunting creatures are running amok out there. Either Resident Evil 4 (game) ripped off the head-splitting creature design of Blade II (movie), or vice versa, or they both ripped off a third thing. Our guys team up with way too many elite vampires (including Ron Perlman and Donnie Yen) to fight the new beasts, tables are turned and poor Wesley’s blood gets harvested again, nearly everyone dies, and thus far I have avoided literally every Ryan Reynolds movie so let’s keep that going and not watch part three. In the Elm Street tradition, the only blu extra I watched was the Cypress Hill video.

Ron explodes someone using pure love and light:

I realized that Tsui Hark wrote/produced this Dragon Inn remake between Once Upon a Time in China movies, and I proceeded to watch it with the wrong soundtrack selected, wondering why everyone was so badly dubbed, damn it. Beautiful action film, with more people twirling through the air holding swords than I’ve ever seen in a movie before.

Tall Tony 2 is protecting the children of his late superior from the power-mad evil eunuch’s forces. He meets up with fellow fighter/girlfriend Brigitte Lin at the desert inn run by Maggie Cheung, a mercenary whose chef serves previous guests for dinner. They spend half the movie looking for the secret exit door and when they finally escape through it after defending a massive attack on the inn, they only get a three second head start over president eunuch Donnie Yen due to a scarf mishap – they might as well have walked out the damn door. Maggie and her chef choose the righteous side and help the others defeat Donnie during a sandstorm. I saw Iron Vest in there somewhere, guess he did not survive.

Mouseover to see what happens when you hold your battle pose for too long:
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Jet Li and Rosamund Kwan are back, taking vacation with Foon (now played by Max Mok, Sammo’s buddy in Pedicab Driver), apparently with no hard feelings after Foon teamed up with the disruptive Iron Vest in part one. Strange for this episode to be the follow-up, since the first one begins with Wong Fei-hung wishing to expel all foreigners, and here his enemy is a violent flaming-arrow-shooting cult which wishes to… expel all foreigners. Kidnapping Rosamund for owning a camera and burning down Jet’s medical conference are direct attacks, true.

The baddest-ass fighter isn’t even a cult member (though the cult’s bulletproof mystic is pretty good, played by Jet’s stunt double), it’s a cop who’s happy to play-fight Wong but won’t help out the children the cult is trying to murder. The cop is Donnie Yen in his breakout year, with Tsui casting him in this and the Dragon Inn remake. Both these guys die in the end, after some magical wire work, as does friendly David Chiang (the dandy of Boxer from Shantung), but beloved Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen (Zhang Tielin of The Magic Crane) escapes safely to begin his revolution.

In the extras, Yen casually refers to himself as “the ultimate martial arts opponent for Jet Li” and explains the difference between being a great martial artist and a great martial arts actor.

JW kills some guys in desert, incl The Elder. Whitebeard Harbinger Clancy “Mr. Krabs” Brown tells McShane the hotel has been condemned, then the Marquis kills Cedric Daniels, blows the place up, and sends blind swordsman Caine after JW. Every scene dramatically drawn out – you get the sense that everyone is playing their assigned role according to fate, except for this fuckin’ Marquis guy, who is annoying and evil.

The Osaka hotel goes down next, Hiroyuki Sanada in charge and his daughter Rina Sawayama in the Cedric concierge role, while a dog-loving bounty hunter called Nobody sits back, waiting for the bounty to get high enough to go after JW. Deals are made: Marquis fucks up Nobody’s hand (why would you do this to a hired assassin) and gets him after Wick, and JW agrees to take on a big metal-teethed dude named Killa to get back into his Russian family’s graces so he can duel the baddie. RIP the big baddie and also Wick – happily, this movie was much better than part 3.

As the Marquis, Bill is the campy Skarsgård, who gets murdered in Barbarian before the even campier Justin Long appears. Blind Donnie Yen was in the Ip Man series and some stuff I’ve seen but don’t remember (Iron Monkey is due a rewatch). As “Nobody” (a Ghost Dog reference), Shamier Anderson, who has been in unrelated movies named Bruised and Bruiser. The guy with the metal teeth, that’s Scott Adkins, the dude you all love so much? Y’all really want me to sit through a Jean-Claude Van Damme sequel to see more of this guy?