Interesting Premise

Rating: Null/10 (10 December 2002)

Blade II succeeds in not retreading with the original Blade film by developing the premise of Blade joining forces with his enemy, the vampires, to face an even greater threat. I don't think the filmmakers fully exploited this concept, and fell into the rut of typical filmmaking anyway. At least it has the premise. Possible Spoilers below:

One of my gripes with any sequel continuation is the episodal nature of the films. Most TV episodes begin and end with nothing really changing--you still have the same characters in a similar position, and every now and then the show gets ambitious and changes their relation to each other. Only when an actor leaves does something dramatic happen. Same can be said of film sequels, and if they do try to do something dramatic within the film they find a way to hit the reset button.
Look at the Batman films--Kim Basinger's role could have been reprised, but no. Michelle Pfiefer, Nicole Kidman, same story. Batman, the character, and his relations to everyone around him never really change throughout the films. In Batman & Robin the butler may die--yeah right, like any writer has the balls to make a permanent change to the existing Batman world on celluloid. By the end of the film, everything is pretty much the same except for the inevitable team up of Robin and Batgirl. The comics have more ambition than the films--at least they had the guts to originally add those characters. That's not to say the comics can let a character stay dead . . .
In Blade, Whistler dies. In Blade II, they bring him right back. It'd be nice if in life we could just push a reset button and have things fixed like that. In this one, Blade starts to develop a sympathy for a certain vampiric vixon, but what happens? She wasn't around at the beginning of the film, so consider her already gone. Blade's new assistant, what's his name? Is he part of the typical Blade world? No. Guess who he's really working for?
Blade II has a writer who's too timid around the character to properly explore Blade enough to make permanent changes to his environment. As a result, you can predict this entire freakin' film based on the Blade character. You don't even have to see any of the film's footage to predict who dies and lives. It wouldn't be so bad, but every film with this nature is -exactly- the same way. So, why exactly are we going to see a film set where nothing really happens across all of its sequels?
Blade II ruins Whistler's death scene, it doesn't pack the punch it should because "oh, he comes back." The people who whined that he died in Blade 1 can watch the part of the film where he's alive, or maybe read the same comic books over and over. Why spend money on something new when there's nothing really new in it? I don't get that. I want to see a sequel who is bold enough to actually make changes to the Blade concept, to the characters, introduce new characters and keep them or kill them off and leave them buried. I'd be very pleasantly shocked to see someone make a film ballsy enough to kill off Blade in the end, as much as I like the character--I'm so itching for some one to do something dramatic with a franchise like this, I would welcome that. But hey, that's not going to happen. Too many people would whine because someone has more ambition than they do.
Other things that annoyed me with this film--the villains all looked alike. Not one of the film's many villains had the flair and personality of Frost from the first film, which was disappointing.