ATROCIOUS B MOVIE FOLLOW UP TO SUPERB ORIGINAL

Rating: Null/10 (30 January 2003)

BLADE was fantastic. A super cool, super sexy, kick ass vampire film with a great (super) hero, great villains (a perfectly cast Stephen Dorff) and fantastic fight sequences. Blade 2 is just atrocious. WHY? It shouldn't be, it has the same script writer (David Goyens) and a seemingly bigger budget. But it looks cheaper. The acting is atrocious and believe it or not it is actually really badly dubbed in some scenes (why was it dubbed to begin with?).
It looks very cheap. Badly lit, cheap 80's stylisation and very few fight sequences- we spend more time with the blood pack (rubbish breed of semi vampires) and plot set-ups that fall into place later in the film, that dominate over action (ignore reviews that say Blade 2 ups the ante on action- we see Blade kick ass three times and it's seems to miss out on the originals self conscious sense of coolness). The original had a really frenetic pace and a hero in Blade who was too cool for school but was also fairly angst driven. In this he spends half the time insulting the blood pack and investigating fancy gadgets and not nearly enough time getting down to business.
The truth is Blade was just a few steps behind the Matrix (in terms of the modernisation of it's fight sequences which actually came out before the Matrix). BLADE 2 looks and feels remarkably similar to a cross between Alien Resurrection (right down to the appearance of Ron Perlman who plays a very> similar character in both) and an episode of the A Team (if it ever featured vampires).
Admittedly the effects of the Reapers are excellent (but are severely underused) as is the creative spin on the CGI driven fight sequences (these are quite remarkable in never-before-seen ways, but are also severely underused). Most shocking of all though is that most critics seem to think it's an improvement over the original!! That's like saying the PHANTOM MENACE is the best Star Wars ever......it simply is BS.