Blade: The Series
By stephanie - Monday, August 7th, 2006
I was not a rabid fan of the Blade movies; if I were, I think I’d be super pissed. Yet “Blade: The Series” somehow manages to be excessively disappointing even to this lukewarm fan of the original film.
In fact, I’ll admit I couldn’t get all the way through the initial two-hour episode. So perhaps my judgments are premature…but, on the other hand, this is kind of like being out at a bar, talking to some annoying jerk hitting on you, and knowing quite early on when it’s time to cut your losses.
Let’s see what I didn’t like about the series. How about…hmm…bad acting, bad plot, bad fight scenes, and a cheesy ass digital soundtrack.
Sticky Fingaz as Blade is completely wooden (as one reviewer on IMDb complained), but he wasn’t given much good material to work with either. Regardless as to who’s to blame, his character just comes off as brutish, dumb, and excessively violent – a far cry from the tortured, intelligent and aggressive Blade played by Wesley Snipes.
And it seems to me that the direction has a lot to do with the problems with this show. There’s an excessive focus on blood and gore – but not cool blood and gore, or fun blood and gore. Cool blood and gore might involve some finesse or good fight choreography. Fun blood and gore is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. What we do get is a lot of large bodies getting tossed around, things getting broken, and blood spattering all over the camera lens.
Vampire cliches are rampant here as well, including pretentious gothic dialogue and the requisite goth club with punk rock playing in the background. Don’t any vampires hang out in regular dance clubs playing hip-hop? That whole goth club thing is so….1995. It’s already been done to death with Forever Knight. Can we move on, please?
It’s rare that I won’t finish a show I’m watching, but this kind of pained me. If I happened to have nothing better else to do, I might watch it…but then again, sometimes I like to watch infomercials too.