Like most people these days when I see Hollywood has had to adapt another comic book hero to make a film, I think oh no here we go again. In the past we have had Superman, Batman the Mask, and cringe, The Shadow. It was with a great sense of trepidation I sat down to the New Line Cinema production of Blade.

For those of you out there who do not know the plot of the story, it goes something like this: a pregnant mortal woman is bitten by a vampire on her way to the hospital to have her baby, and at the moment of birth the umbilical cord is cut before the baby is completely infected. The resulting child a boy grows up as an outcast from society, being neither human nor vampire but a strange hybrid of the two. He grows to manhood exacting revenge on the immortals that slaughtered his mother and left him a life of bloodshed.

When I see the cast for the film adaptation of Blade it’s time to disengage brain and let the film wash over me, for we have Wesley Snipes in the title role, ably supported by Kris Kristofferson who plays the character called Whistler, who invents, builds and maintains Blades armoury. As Mr Snipes has built up his reputation on “popcorn” movies (films with very little in the way of complex plot lines and more in the way of action and special effects). Wesley Snipes has found the role he was born to play - for he is Blade just as Sean Connery was James Bond. Blade does not disappoint with it’s thumping sound track and fast editing style, clearly aimed at the youth market, with the viewer having very little time to think about how little content there is. But to sit back and wonder at the fight scenes and Computer Generated Images, such as the destruction of Blade adversaries and city backgrounds.

My biggest criticism of this film is that it’s just a martial arts movie in a comic book cover. Of course we cannot forget the ego of the leading man who is also a producer of the film, who gets his sunglassed face in nearly every scene of the movie. You can’t help but feel the man is trying too hard to show the world how fit he is, and how much martial arts he knows.(Wesley Snipes is a black belt in a couple of martial arts) As I write this, the sequel Blade Two (The Blood Hunt), is going to be released around the Spring of this year, obviously with the amount of money the first film made (opening weekend twenty two million dollars alone) the public must have a great appetite for this genre of film, and with the current atmosphere (post September 11th ) the Americans at the moment require their heroes, no matter where to be visible and to be heroic.

My conclusion about all this is, when the big studios are going about making money they are oblivious to everything but the bottom line. (How much money they are going to make) The general public don’t care about this, they just want bigger and better thrills, and to be entertained for a couple hours in the dark of a cinema, and forget the real world. If you are a fan of this type of film and a lot of people appear to be by the amount of money the first film made, I have only one thing to say, “you pay your money and you make your choice”.