Yet another disappointing sequel

Rating: Null/10 (29 March 2002)

Let's just remember what made Blade such a cool movie, before thinking about this sequel. We had impressive visuals, cool action, a charismatic and hypercool bad guy, an underdog saving the world scenario, some genuinely surprising and gripping scenes (the intro, and Blade's peculiar way of regenerating before the final battle) all blended into a stylish movie.
Let's just look what Blade 2 has to offer: Impressive visuals, cool action,.... Ooops. We ran out of things to praise. Especially the first twenty minutes suck, being a poor and disjointed connection of scenes needed to define the enemy, reunite Whistler and Blade, introduce the wacky sidekick, and team Blade up with some vampires. And, worst of all, the movie employs that ancient and least original trick to clear some backstory: a narrating voice (Blade) explaining the setting during the start credits.

The story is a bit simple: New monster vampires with weird slimy mouths begin eating vampires, vampires get Blade, Blade helps them hunt down the mutated vampires and try to track down their leader. Now, every single one of the mutated vampires looks identical. So much for charismatic bad guy. They look and move like a halfway-combo between the pygmy mummies out of "The mummy returns" and the zombies in "Night of the Living Dead". And they're immune to silver and garlic and pretty much any physical force. But all in all, they're a weak solution of the type "if our bad guy is not nearly as charismatic or cool as the previous one, let's at least make him invincible, ugly and disgusting, and give him an army". Slime instead of charisma - might satisfy some people, but I felt it ruined the class of the movie.
The action is good, there's no doubt about it. There's lots of kung-fu style fighting and shooting and exploding vampires and it's even well done, even if slightly too fast-paced. The only glitch: Blade is posing way too much. We know he's cool, we know he can pose, but does he really need to to it twice as often and twice as obviously as the original one?
All in all, an average movie. The original had class and style and it was fresh and original. This is just "How to make a sequel for dummies" with a bigger budget, and no style whatsoever.
5/10