The best in the trilogy, showcases Del Toro's many talents

Rating: 8/10 (17 April 2015)

The second piece of this vampire hunter trilogy blurs the lines between Action, Super Hero and Horror, which personally I'm kinda liking.
This time around, Blade (Wesley Snipes; New Jack City, Chaos), Abraham Whistler (Planet of the Ape, Provinces of Night) and new arrival Scud (Norman Reedus; The Boondock Saints, Pandorum) must team up with the Blood Pack, made up of Dieter Reinhardt (Ron Perlman; Hellboy, Outlander), Nyssa Damaskinos (Hell Ride, Wrong Turn at Tahoe), Chupa (Matt Schulze; The Transporter, The Fast and the Furious), Asad (Danny-John Jules; Red Dwarf, Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels), Snowman (Donnie Yen; IP Man, Highlander: Endgame), Verlaine (Marit Kile; Doctors, Blue Murder), Priest (Tony Curran; The Midnight Meat Train, Underworld: Evolution), and Lighthammer (Daz Crawford; Hammer of the Gods, Game Over) in order to defeat UberVamp Jared Nomak (personal favourite Luke Goss; Death Race 2, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Tekken) and his army of Reaper Strain Vampires.
With me so far? No? Then go watch the damn movie! It's very bloody good. The opening is almost as strong as the original, and pretty much everything else about it is better. Not to mention the fact that I'm a total Luke Goss fanboy. All of the characters are so much better. They interact and everything. And even though Wesley Snipes has never really impressed me as an actor, the character of Blade was a little less cheesy, which always helps, and basically just better all 'round.
SPOILERS FOR BLADE, BLADE II and TRINITY: An interesting point, without ruining anything about the trilogy is that in all three films, vampires fight vampires. Not in the whole "Blade's half a vampire so he kills full-on vampires" way, although there is most certainly that, but in Blade, Frost kills the Elder vampires to become La Magra. In Blade II, The Blood Pack and Blade team up to take down a new, much more dangerous breed of vampires. And in Trinity, Dracula goes around killing vampires, pretty much for fun. Just food for thought. I've never read the comics much myself, so I don't really know if that's something that's been going on for a while, or if it just turned out that way.
There were a couple of lame bits. Some very stupid lines like "they took all of our weapons. Even your sword." Even your sword! Man, the single weapon for which you were named after that has killed more vampires than any other thing on the planet, and the vampires took it away from you? The audacity! And there's this whole thing where Whistler is alive again, they went most of the way to explaining it, and then sort of forgot. It would have been so simple to have a four second flashback cover the lot of it. Oh well.
Still though, I'm very, very fond of this one.
77%
-Gimly