Blade, the crusader

Rating: Null/10 (6 September 2002)

"Blade II" is an enjoyable formula-film, characterized from an almost unsuspicious romantic tinge. In the second chapter of the series, the new vampires leader sends his attractive daughter to negotiate a temporary alliance with Wesley Snipes-Blade, half man-half vampire, immune to the light and silver, and pitiless exterminator (in ninja-samurai style) of vampires. The final goal is to chase a common enemy: the deadly Nomak, a vampire-Frankestein, degenerated from an unlucky cloning experiment by the vampires leader himself, able to infect both men and vampires, transforming them in degenerate beings. To help Blade in the audacious enterprise, it's ready a squad of presumed ultra-trained vampires, who are going to go up as smoke. At the end, after an apocalyptic `ridding of pests', and literally incinerated all the characters of the script, Snipes and the faithful Kris Kristofferson (this one revived from the first `Blade') are the only survivors. It turns out immediate to the reader as the final goal's surely achieved without need to add any particulars. There is not even the risk, sometimes feared, that the new sequel could foresee too many points of contact with the actual chapter. The general plant of the plot goes back to "Aliens" and to "The dirty dozen," without neglect suggestions even from "Popeye" (the regenerating dive in the pool of blood remembers much the "spinach-effect"; and after all also Blade is a character of the comic strips). In the context of an approximate screenplay, that seems spoiled from repeated afterthoughts, it stands out the not verbal dialectic between Blade and Nyssa, the daughter of the Vampire Nation `leader maximo'. The tenebrous Nyssa is not able to win the dull distrust of the crusader Blade in useful time and, tricked even from the father, broken not from the fights but in the heart, she surrenders without resist to the infected bite of the degenerate stepbrother, choosing then to incinerate between the arms of Blade, in a dark romanticism that remembers "Arc of Triumph". At the end it seems however to go in ash just the hero-Blade, incapable in distinguishing between nobility and poverty and between faith and fanaticism; the whole story at the same time coming to an unintentional parable on the destructive effects of the ideological absolutism. It would have been interesting to go into the opposition between humans such biologically but ethically vampires (see the characters of Scud and Kounen) and vampires such biologically but ethically humans; but that required too much courage... "Blade II" stays an enjoyable formula-film.