Blade is back

Rating: 7/10 (8 April 2016)

Blade (Wesley Snipes) is back, bringing his unique vampire hunting skills to a new scenario. You may remember that in the last film Whistler (Kristofferson) appeared to be killed off, well the audience was deceived and he wasn't killed off. Blade is doing his job while looking for clues to find his old friend. Filling Whistlers role at home with Blade is Scud (Norman Reebus), a young wannabe cool kid who enjoys making vampire slaying equipment and watching powerpuff girls while toking on a big fat spliff. Blade finds Whistler and attempts to detox him. All of a sudden Black Ops vampires (Leonor Varela a.k.a. Nyssa, and Danny John Jules a.k.a. Asad) infiltrate Blade's base of operations with a message from the vampire overlord Damaskinos (Thomas Kretschmann). Blade and his merry gang of slayers agree to meet the Vampire overlord who tells them that a mutant vampire strain is making a new breed, dubbed Reapers. The only way to stop the mutation is to kill his alpha carrier Nomak (Luke Goss, who is great BTW), killing him will kill all the reapers he has created as they are linked via blood. Blade begrudgingly agrees to join the Black Ops Vampire team, a.k.a. The Bloodpack which features random vagabond bad-add vampires such as Reinhart (Ron Perlman), Priest (Tony Curren) and Lighthammer (Daz Crawford). Working with Vampires to bring down a mutant vampire lets Blade be exposed to the real underground Vampire world, his hope is that working with the vampires will allow him to learn enough about them to bring them all down in the future. And so, the epic journey and battle begins.
This film goes a long way to better the first Blade film and it actually does it in parts. The main gripes in this for me are Whistlers return after being killed in the first film, the overuse of obvious CGI in some of the fight scenes with Blade, and the obvious plot twist which is looming with Scud. Apart from those things the film is actually more mayhem and chaos than the first film which actually works really well. Despite it working good as a comic-book fan this isn't the Blade I'm used to, there are obvious attempts at humour and puns within the film which isn't Blade, but unless you are a comic purist like me you'll probably enjoy it. The origin story is featured in the film again (directly stolen from the first film) so you do not have to have seen the first film to work out where Blade comes from and how he got his powers. I enjoyed this film, maybe not as much as the first film because that had charm and style mixed with a good plot and dialogue. As an action film though this film excels beyond the first film, I just think there was more potential that could have been milked from this. Blade's relationship with Nyssa maybe or using the member of the bloodpack more - bearing in mind Donnie Yen (Snowman) has a lot of experience in the martial arts combat choreography featured throughout this film. All in all though Guilllermo Del Torro has made a great film which fits nice in the series of Blade films or works as a standalone. Like the first the musical score is upbeat and pacey much like the film. 7 out of 10