A bloody good action flick, and the best in the series.

Rating: 8/10 (20 May 2006)

Starring: Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Ron Perlman
Last time we saw Blade, Wesley Snipes's half-breed vampire slayer, his hunting operation had been heavily compromised. His warehouse headquarters had been rushed, his mentor Whistler (Kristofferson) had shot himself to prevent imminent bitings -- no matter, he prevailed, he got his man. In these movies, they always do.
Flash-forward a few years later and Whistler is not dead. The vamps have turned him and kept him alive, so they can torture him for all eternity. Blade tracks him down, busts some heads, turns him back and we're back to square one. Of course, the film is not content with closing the curtain at the half-hour mark, so now the story can really begin: The warehouse complex finds itself blitzed again, this time by a pair of super-stealth special-ops vampires dressed in jet-black spy-gear -- one of them a skilled swordsman, the other our leading lady. Blade intercepts and they kung-fu fight. Turns out the battle, flashy and entertaining as it was, was all for naught -- the vampires, members of an elite vamp-squad called the Bloodpack, have come to make a peace offering on behalf of the Vampire Nation. You see, there's a new threat stalking them -- bigger and badder than Blade: Reapers, vicious vampire hybrids whose scarred faces mask their horrific weapons. The vamps don't just want a truce with Blade, however -- they want him to fight the Reapers with them. He faces a dilemma: do nothing and let the Reapers move on to humans once they're finished with vampires, or help the vampires, only to have them try to kill him when the job's finished. If you can't tell which way he finally leans, you've never seen an action movie.
I liked the first Blade film if slightly. It was a fun movie with some very cool moments, but didn't live up to the hype. The third, 'Trinity' is a mind-numbing disaster. Oh the difference a good director can make! Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, Hellboy) has the reigns here and clearly had a good time with the movie: it briskly bounces from one energetic action sequence to the next, with a fair number of frightful sights thrown in to liven things up. This is a good thing -- with a wafer-thin plot that takes enough turns to keep your attention, Del Toro knows exactly what kind of movie he's making: a pure action flick. And he delivers the goods. The movie is dripping with cool, and while it may not be a classic, it's a fun flick to throw on and let it suck you in.
FINAL SCORE: 8.3/10
If you've never seen a Blade movie before, no worries. There's not a lot to catch up on, and you can jump straight to the "good chapter" and not miss a beat. If the movie suffers anywhere at all (other than the plot department), it's that the battle sequences occasionally suffer Spider-man Syndrome, wherein the impossible is made possible by some glaringly obvious CGI. Other than that, if action movies are your thing, Blade II is a bloody good show.