Oct 092001
 
toxic

The vampires have decided to join human society and become just another racial group.  However, murder disrupts the political system and a mix matched pair of police, one vampire (Adrian Paul), one human (Bokeem Woodbine), must solve the crimes.

An astonishingly bad film.  Now why do the vampires want to join this future society that’s two parts Nazi Germany, one part techno goth club?  Perhaps because the filmmakers were trying so desperately to say something deep about the Jews in WWII, but couldn’t remember what.  The plot is absurd, reminiscent of a live-action Vampire the Masquerade role-playing session.  Vampires in politics, what fun!  The action scenes are what you get when incompetents try to copy The Matrix.  If you don’t have the money and skill to use wire-work, don’t use wire-work.  Is that so tricky?

But it is the characters and appalling acting that transforms this film to toxic waste.  The buildings act better than Bokeem Woodbine as  the clichéd, hard-talking, always grouchy human cop.  He must be tough because he says “fuck.”  As he’s really tough, he must say it several hundred times.  Apparently the writer couldn’t come up with dialog for him, so he just kept pasting in “fuck.”  It’s a fine word, but perhaps, just perhaps, a second or even a third word would be nice.  Adrian Paul, avoiding his Highlander persona, decides that somewhere between John Waters and the Men in Black is the perfect fit.  It isn’t.

The setting is somewhere near the present (they have plastic), but in a 1984-like police state, with slogans suggesting that citizens turn in their neighbors.  The cars look about forty years out-of-date and the buildings are falling down.  Shot is bold, primary colors, I found I was really taken in by this world.  Too bad something wasn’t done with it.  The Breed demonstrates that films are about characters, not about the environment, so when your characters are unappealing, and, far worse, uninteresting, nothing else matters.

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