AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS8/10 7 months ago
[7.5/10] *Blade II* is one-hundred percent a style over substance movie. But what style! This is basically a tech demo for early 2000s CGI, tricked out weaponry, overexaggerated martial arts, and the kind of prosthetic and practical grotesquery that director Guillermo del Toro specializes in. Everything is about the vibes, the style, the imagery, and the mood. The story is an afterthought. And yet, I’m not really complaining.
The plot is there. This time around, the vampires seek an alliance with Blade. A new breed of vampires, dubbed “reapers”, have emerged. They look like more old school nosferatu-style vampires, with a more animalistic gait, immunity to garlic and silver, an apparent healing factor, and a ravenous “crackhead” style desire to feed on anything and everything, including regular vampires.
Look, there is something profoundly lazy about asking “What if we had vampires who fed on other vampires?” but also something profoundly cool about it in that ten-year-old imagination game sort of way. The reapers themselves are neat antagonists, with some extra juice that makes them harder to kill than the usual vamps who Blade cuts through like butter, and the sense that they’re genuine movie monsters worth fearing, rather than just cool dudes in black leather who happen to sport fangs.
They lend themselves to one of the things del Toro does best -- freak the audience the hell out. There are so many gloriously creepy moments involving the reapers. The way their jaws unhinge, revealing an undulating spiked tongue, is marvelously, skin-crawlingly awful. The way one takes a giant hammer to the head and just snaps its neck back into place, or another gets stabbed in the abdomen only to scurry up a wall with its innards spilling out is delightfully gross. And when forgettable love interest Nyssa dissects one of them, the pulsating viscera of the beast’s internal organs makes for a fantastic, nauseating effect.
*Blade II* runs entirely on action-packed or bloody spectacle. The latter is a favorite of mine from del Toro’s filmography, and on that front, the film doesn’t disappoint.
The action ain't half bad either! If you like to see a motley crew of badasses in black leather popping vampires like party balloons with increasingly absurd implements, you’ve come to the right place. None of this bears even the patina of realism, but that’s a feature, not a bug. Vamps explode like popcorn balls filled with firecrackers. Warriors defy gravity with their strikes and slams. All manner of ridiculous weaponry pumps enemies full of lead, light, and the chemical compound du jour. This is a smorgasbord of absurd combat, and it’s enjoyable for its shallow thrills at nearly every turn.
Of course, Wesley Snipes is the star, and earns the designation once again. He has this impossibly cool presence that helps carry the tenor of certain scenes. Whether it’s him, or his stunt double, or his CGI duplicate, the way he moves within the frame is bone-cracking yet balletic. You buy his prowess as the daywalker, which is an essential part of the movie.
My only complaint about the action is that there’s too much of it at once. *Blade II* is all ups. Outside of a brief reunion with Blade and Whistler early on, and a short interlude before the third act, the movie just jumps from high octane set piece to high octane set piece. It steadily becomes a little overwhelming and even exhausting, to where, by the time of the final fight between Blade and Nomak, the patient zero of reapers, it was tough to focus from all the overstimulation along the way to that climactic battle. The pacing here is relentless, which is a bold choice, but one that ends up detracting from the top notch action at play, when you never have a chance to breathe or differentiate it.
Nonetheless, part of what keeps this business interesting is the outstanding production design and costuming work evident in the movie. The production team finds or makes any number of eye-catching, over-the-top backdrops in which to set the fireworks and fisticuffs, from a rave designed to top the signature sequence of the first film, to a regal vampiric lair, to a craggy and cavernous sewer. There’s a superb sense of place here, which is part of how *Blade II* is able to make up for its threadbare story.
And the costuming is part of how it’s able to make up for its threadbare characters. Make no mistake -- save for a returning Blade and Whistler, everyone in the cast is new, and most of them can’t act to save their lives. But by god, they look cool as hell, with distinctive variations on the *Matrix*-y black leather themes, funky hairstyles or tattoos, and other parts of their unique looks that give them a flavor from appearance alone, which is good since neither the script nor the performances develop them in the slightest.
The exception, of course, is del Toro favorite, Ron Perlman, who plays Reinhardt, the head goon on the goofily-named “blood pack”, a group of elite vampires originally trained to kill Blade, but now taking orders from him to help stop the reapers. Reinhardt is as underwritten as anyone, but Perlman is the only player in the piece who can match Snipes in terms of presence and attitude, and it helps elevate an otherwise generic role.
Pretty much everyone else in the picture is barely-there cannon fodder. The head vampire and head reaper are more a bundle of prosthetics than they are characters. Most of the goon squad Blade leads have personalities that end at their costumes. A young Norman Reedus (who would go on to fight the undead again in *The Walking Dead* plays a memorable enough young punk named Scud with aplomb.
The biggest offender in the cast is Leonor Varela, who plays Nyssa, another blood pack fighter who’s the female lead of the film, who seemingly has never experienced actual genuine emotions or spoken actual words before. In a film where the performers are more likely to literally set the world on fire with their acting than figuratively do so, she nonetheless stands out as uniquely, comically bad in her line deliveries and attempts to emote.
It’s not like the script gives her much to work with, though. David S. Goyer turns in another one of these scripts, and about all you can say for it is that it serves as a suitably spine for del Toro and company to build set pieces off of. Nyssa’s romantic relationship with Blade is as hollow as a blood-sucker’s soul, and her relationship with her uber-vamp dad is no richer. Honestly, it feels like the script is barely even trying, content to do the bare minimum with the knowledge that nobody is here for an intricate story, so all it can offer is some stock beats and attempts at a few surprises.
There is the occasional mildly clever twist, like the film wanting you to think that Whistler may be at turncoat after his time with the vampires, only for Scud to in fact be the quisling, or the reapers being genetically engineered experiments from the head vampire rather than an accidental evolutionary enemy. But honestly, it’s all just window dressing for the stylish skirmishes that are the film’s stock and trade.
I don’t have a problem with that. *Blade II* knows what it wants to be and delivers on it. If you want to be amazed by the gory spectacle, wowed by the buckets of bullets and slickly-edited vampiric destruction, you’ve cued up the right movie. If you want to just hang out in this world, of hip hop-backed slaughter sessions and gothic tech gone wild amid counter culture raves, you’re in the right spot. If you’re asking for story or character or all those little things that make a film feel human, well, that’s been largely drained out of this one like a casual vampire snack. But if you’re here for the action, here for the spectacle, and here for the vibes, the daywalker’s got you covered.
