The Breed (2001)

I'm a sucker (no pun intended) for movies set "In the Near Future". It's often a set up for a dystopian tale, or an urban fantasy masquerading as a science fiction film. In the case of The Breed, it's both.
The main character, Grant (Bokkem Woodbine), is an NSA agent, but I'm not sure that NSA is meant to mean the National Security Agency, which in the real world is known for it's spooks - he's more of a noir homicide detective slash U.S. marshall. The society is very "Brazil" but of a Soviet vein instead of the British-style bureaucracy.
The foul-mouthed Grant and his partner Phil (Reed Diamond) are working with the police to find a serial killer that is taking young women and draining them of their blood. Through luck they happen upon a van suspected to have been used by the killer, and indeed it had been for the killer is still in the near-by building with his latest victim. Grant watches as the man he shot dead gets up and rips out Phil's throat before climbing up a sheer wall, which Grant sees from the trash bin he has been thrown into. He reports to his superiors everything he saw, including the killers fangs; and when called into the director's office expects to be dismissed out of hand but is instead brought into the cabal of those that know that vampires walk amongst us. By this point, Grant has said 'fuck' a dozen times, including directly to the director and we're only a little over ten minutes into the movie. Now, I'm not one of those that thinks this word should be avoided - if the character needs to say 'fuck', the character needs to say 'fuck'. I get that. But, what I don't get is that only Grant says it, well at least at this point in the movie he is the only one to have been using it. If this is how they're going to show that Grant is a bad-ass or a free spirit, it doesn't bode well for the next hour or so. And to some extent this is what they did. Ho-hum.
At the NSA offices, between propaganda messages playing in the background, Grant is read into the secret and introduced to his new partner, Aaron Grey (Adrian Paul), who just happens to be a police detective for the vampire police. I know Paul for his work in the show Highlander, so of course immediately begin to draw comparisons between one immortal character and another. He's playing roughly the same character, but no complaints as he acts circles around Woodbine. Grey is a relatively young vampire only 80 or 90 years old if the near future were to happen today. He has flashbacks to his days being persecuted by the Nazis and later tells Grant his origin story and reveals that the leader of the vampire people's himself, Cross (Peter Halasz), turned him.
The outcome of the movie is predictable - the leader of the opposition, a vampire named West (Zen Gesner), is a red herring and the leader Cross, is of course the real baddie. Grant's vampire love interest Lucy Westenra (Bai Ling) follows a similarly predictable path lover-traitor-true patriot-lover. All the while I am left thinking that minus the fucking constant fucking use of the fucking f-word and the five seconds of naked boobs and naked butt (both on women of course - who would ever want to see a man's naked butt?) that I am likely watching the pilot for a television series, especially when the film ends with Grey coming to Westenra's place to collect Grant to go investigate a murder. The quality of the special effects and acting would certainly bear this out, but since I haven't seen anything like this since the film came out, which kind of surprises me. It they did make a series based on this premise, especially if it starred Paul, I would watch it.
The one thing that surprised me about this film was the way that it dealt with Grant's initial desire to kill all the vampires, which is the feeling that much of the NSA carries through to the end. It didn't treat it as heroic, but instead compared it to the racism that was exhibited by the Nazis. They did this with a heavy hand, and I can only imagine that they felt that such an explicit comparison was necessary for their desired audience, Grey at one point says to Grant, "You're a racist, just like the Nazis", an audience which I imagine to be comprised of Gen Xers and Gen Yers who may or may not know their history and who are more likely than not less than sober. Actually, profanity aside, I felt like this film should have proceeded by an ad saying, "From the writers who brought you Highlander and the producers that brought you Xena and the Adventures of Hercules".