by June Pulliam and Tony Fonseca
Blade II. Dir. Guillermo del Toro. 2002.Here's a no-brainer: what does Hollywood do after making a highly lucrative film? Of course the answer is obvious. It produces a sequel that is damn near the same movie as the original. The prevalent logic seems to be that if people enjoyed seeing a film once, then they should enjoy seeing the same actors, plot lines, camera angles, and fight scenes again. The flaw in this logic is that this isn't always true. Some viewers, ourselves included, expect a sequel to expand on the previously established story line, not to retell the original tale in a far more boring manner than it was originally told. Unfortunately, Blade II does precisely that.
Even more unfortunately, Blade II is derivative of every action adventure film made in the past 10 years. The CGI special effects are reminiscent of those seen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix, where a leaping character seems frozen mid-Kung-Fu kick in space and time, while the audience's point of view is rotated around the this impossibly suspended person. Other than martial arts fanatics and teenage boys (of all ages), no one really wants to see improbable fight scenes any more. CTHD improved dramatically on the overly-animated fights of The Matrix, perhaps even perfecting the technique. So one has to wonder why del Toro, a director who created a gem of a vampire film in the eerie and atmospheric Cronos (1992), would even bother to dabble in CGI fight choreography.The silliness of computer generated action aside, what really makes Blade II interminably dull is that it is derivative of Blade. The original Blade was a fine film. It used the conventions of the vampire genre as a commentary on racism, and it was a damn good action adventure picture as well. In the original film, Blade wishes to eradicate vampire-kind before a renegade in their midst can enslave the entire human race as cattle. Blade has a very personal vendetta against vampires, since his mother was attacked, and to his knowledge, killed by one when she was pregnant with him, making him an eternal slave to his thirst. It is only through enormous discipline coupled with weird science that Blade can triumph over his animal instincts, becoming the day walker who is an enemy to all other vampires. Like other black vampires before him, Blade doesn't see his condition as something natural, or better, than mortality. Here he is spiritual kin to Mamuwalde in Blacula, whose condition is worse than slavery.
Blade II follows the same plot as the first, but lacks the interesting context of racial politics. In Blade II, a mutated type of vampire threatens everyone, living and undead. The new creature resembles what would happen if F. W. Murnau's Count Orlock in Nosferatu had a child with the Alien in Ridley Scott's 1979 film. They have the hairless, wizened appearance of Max Schreck, combined with the horizontally expandable jaws of the creature in Alien (apparently these highly evolved vampires have de-evolved as far as cinematic monsters go). Blade is convinced to form an alliance with his enemies from the first film in order to defeat these new creatures, who feed on all, even on other vampires. After several computer generated fights where blood is spilled and limbs are hacked, the world is ultimately safe from these upstarts.
We had hoped for more from Guillermo del Toro, especially given the subtlety with which he handles vampirism in his Cannes nominated film, Cronos. But alas, all that del Toro assimilated into Blade II from this earlier film is the very talented actor Ron Perlman, but Perlman is absolutely wasted here, once again doomed to run around in the sewers and ruined subway tunnels as he did in the television series Beauty and the Beast and in the dark grotesquerie City of Lost Children.
After seeing the evolution of vampirism from Blade to Blade II, we cannot help but think that some things are just better left to die. It is really a shame that Abraham Van Helsing does not work for New Line Cinema: he could have driven a stake through the heart of this travesty, and for that matter any possible derivative Hollywood sequel.