From Mashable · Kristy Puchko · · 3m
Mahershala Ali finally got his blade
The Blade movie died at Marvel, so its star and a director built something better: a hit man raising three kids alone.
In brief
The Blade movie died at Marvel, so its star and a director built something better: a hit man raising three kids alone. When the big plan collapses, the thing you build from the wreckage can be more personal, and better, than what you lost. Originally reported by Mashable.
When the plan falls apart
The film asks what you do when big plans collapse. So did the two men who made it, after Marvel's Blade fell through.
A hit man with a sword
Mahershala Ali plays Latif, a Muslim family man who kills to protect his community. Then his wife dies and he drops everything, including a body he was mid-way through disposing of.
Born from Marvel's collapse
Bassam Tariq and Ali met developing the MCU's Blade. When it stopped coming together, Tariq handed Ali his own original script instead.
The muscle found a home
Ali put the physique he built for Blade into Latif, and built a complex antihero on top of it rather than a costume.
An opening that tells you everything
Ali bursts into an empty public bathroom and takes down a skinhead with brutal efficiency. You can tell it isn't his first time.
Where the title comes from
Over that violence, a girl reads a Quran passage: asked who to honor after Allah, the Prophet said "your mother" three times before he said "your father."
“Your mother, your mother, your mother.”
He cannot fill her place
Latif fumbles a conversation with his teen daughter about her sexuality and cannot find a source of mother's milk for his infant.
One last job
He wants out of the killing. His handler will not let it go, so he hunts for breast milk while dodging hired guns and a Christian cult leader played by John Cho.
Three movies at once
Gangster drama, intense action, and a tender father-daughter story braid together. Like Sinners, it feels familiar and scorching at the same time.
The details do the talking
The blade at Latif's hip. The video his daughter streams on stolen WiFi. Cho's platinum grill with a diamond cross on every tooth.
Career-best fight work
Ali is quiet before he strikes, coiled like a snake. In one scene he coats leather gloves in lubricant and broken glass, and it works.
Stiff when he needs help
In battle he is loose. Asking anyone for anything, he tightens up, afraid he can never measure up to his wife.
Crying in the mosque
Holding his hungry baby among his community, Latif silently weeps. Tariq borrows the stillness of ma from Kurosawa and Miyazaki before violence breaks it.
The daughter is the heart
On the brink of womanhood, she becomes a second parent and sees her father whole, flaws included. They share a disillusionment with Islam rooted in their lost mother.
A dad joke before the war
A sendoff could have curdled into sentiment. Instead the two share a laugh over a perfect dad joke, and you remember what he is fighting for.
Cho whispers his menace
The cult leader never raises his voice. The cowboy clothes and Christian iconography shout for him while he says terrifying things in a folksy, warm tone.
The main idea
When the big plan collapses, the thing you build from the wreckage can be more personal, and better, than what you lost.
