Andy’s Rating: one notch below Really Liked It (9/13)
After watching Blade last week, I was looking forward to Blade II, especially when I realized that it was directed by Guillermo del Toro. (He directed Hellboy as well as Pan’s Labyrinth, which was nominated for several Academy Awards in 2007, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay.) The end result is a movie that improves and builds upon the original, but still lacks that essential something that makes it a really great movie.
Don’t get me wrong: Blade II is a fun ride. Wesley Snipes is back as the titular vampire-turned-vampire-hunter, except this time he has to join forces with his mortal enemies to fight a new breed of super-vampire that is threatening to wipe out both humans and vampires alike. He and his half-assed team are paired with a squad of vampire super-soldiers led by Ron Perlman, and they are all outfitted with the latest in vampire-fighting gadgets. This creates an extra tension, as both parties are fighting a dangerous enemy, while simultaneously keeping an eye on their new comrades for fear of getting stabbed in the back.
So Wesley Snipes is better this time around, the effects are much improved, and the action sequences are more over-the-top. And for my money, Ron Perlman is just fun to watch. (Some time in the future, I will have to review
Oh, sure, I guess technically it’s a vampire movie, in that it’s about vampires. But it’s a vampire movie like Star Wars is a science-fiction movie. Star Wars is really an epic fantasy movie, with spaceships instead of horses and lightsabers instead of swords. The sci-fi setting is really just a backdrop, and is incidental to the plot. In the same way, Blade II is really just an action movie, or maybe a sci-fi action movie, but the fact that most of the main characters are vampires is mostly glossed over. The elite vampire super-squad is basically just a bunch of superheroes (or supervillains); they are vampires so they can jump around and perform superhuman feats, but they don’t ever pull out their fangs and suck on a nearby victim. And the evil super-vampires are basically aliens (or Aliens), or perhaps those beasties in Pitch Black who are dangerous in the dark, but end up being super-sensitive to light. If you had a copy of the script and a marker, you could change Blade II to a sci-fi movie in about ten minutes. So in that respect, it lacks the kind of gothic tragedy that you would expect from the traditional vampire movie (and that even the first movie dealt with). Add to that a romance that is tacked on at best, and you have a movie that is fun to watch, but doesn’t really have any qualities that are particularly impressive or memorable. It’s better than the first, but not by much.
