Startlingly surpasses the original!

Rating: 10/10 (23 March 2002)

I had been looking forward to seeing this ever since I heard it was being made. I was relatively skeptical, however. Would the villain be as crisp and cool as Stephen Dorff? Would the fight scenes and gore come in as many amounts as it did in the original? During the first fifteen minutes, one of my questions was answered. This intense and extremely satisfying action sequence had already surpassed just about every fight scene in the original. The vampires vaporized into burning dust in a much more glorified fashion, and Wesley Snipes found more unique ways to take them out. This opening was truly eye-popping, and was a good sign of things to come. In general, the movie stayed that way. The action scenes were smoothly intertwined with a storyline that had made a good progression from the first movie (Blade must team up with a group of vampires who had originally been trained to hunt and kill him to help them fight a new and dangerous enemy that feeds on both humans AND vampires). The only thing that this one didn't have that the original had was the cool villain. Stephen Dorff was a more menacing villain than the creepy Nomak. Not that Nomak wasn't menacing at all, but Deacon Frost had more of an entertaining badass factor. But other than that, this movie had more action, more gore, and more bite overall than the first one. Highly recommended!