Friday night fun if not as good as the original.

Rating: 7/10 (17 February 2006)

There is a school of thought, seen on this very website, that suggests Blade 2 is superior to Blade 1. Quite why this is I don't know as, like many films of its ilk, horror sequels, Blade 2 tries to give us everything we saw in the first movie multiplied by 10! It succeeds in this limited goal, but, in my opinion, fails to make a good, simple, coherent or fun action film.
The original Blade was not without its faults and the sequel endeavours to address them. One dimensional characters, failures of plot and a rather weak ending are all details that made the first movie fun but not quite the finished article. Anyone who's seen the final fight in Blade will know exactly what I'm talking about. Unfortunately, in an effort to rev up an already fast paced, hardcore action flick, the director of Blade 2 has gone a bit far...
Since the Matrix, wire work has been done to death so it is to Guillermo del Toro's credit that he tries to do something new. Unfortunately, as with the third Star Wars prequel, the blending together of CGI and real time action fails in two ways: the fighters are neither balletic, nor do they appear human. Here, in Blade 2, we have fights that seem more like a computer game than a film, both in how they look and, equally jarringly, in how the stunt-men/animations move.
Added to this is an unexpected, new found compassion from Wesley Snipes' Blade. Whereas in the first film he'd draw his sword once his firearms were depleted of ammunition, this time he actually fights multiple adversaries with his pig-sticker firmly sheathed! Now maybe the resolution of his mother's death at the end of the first movie made him feel a little bit better about vampires in general, but he's still supposed to be hunting and destroying them for crying out loud... not touching them up.
Similarly, his collection of toys, read weaponry, has suffered a great deal from sequelitis. Whereas before he had cool, retro guns and the occasional unusual tool, now he has silver coated pistols, bizarre ultraviolet grenades, spear guns that fire a bolt of silver at umpteen thousand metres a second and weird, spinning, bladed things which seem to be vampire seeking and capable of turning corners...
Now I must admit to liking it when a film takes a moment to explain what weapons the protagonists are using. Lethal Weapon's comparison of hardware is a great explanation of the two cops characters. In Die Hard, when Karl pulls out his rifle, we get the indication that now he really means business... But in Blade 2 there's an almost fetishistic manner to the way various guns are talked about and the character who builds most of these weapons is both incredibly irksome and very poorly explained. Plus it begs the question: why would someone as friendless as Blade hang out with someone as annoying as Scud? It also made me wonder what happened to the female doctor from the first movie. I don't know if I just missed it but I didn't hear a reason for her absence. Nor did I hear an adequate one for the presence of a guy who did not survive Blade 1...
Other characters have also appeared in the interim and few of them are any good. The story behind this film is that some sort of super ugly vampire has sprung up (Luke Goss playing to type) and the normal vampires need our friend Blade to sort him out. This he goes about doing with the help of the Blood Pack, a bunch of what we're led to believe are the hardest of the hard in the vampire world.
You could've fooled me. Not only are the Blood Pack less than intimidating, they're also incompetent, badly acted and more than a little unintentionally humorous. One also has to wonder why the producers forked out for Donnie Yen, one of Hong Kong's top action stars and a genuinely thrilling martial artist, to be part of the Blood Pack only to have him do absolutely NOTHING IN THE WHOLE FILM! I mean come on! This is the man who's three fights with Jet Li (across two films) are perhaps the greatest martial arts moments EVER! The thought of Yen, Snipes and a decent choreographer had me practically salivating from the off. When it became clear it wasn't coming I was more than a little miffed. I was also more than a little sickened. Blade 2 is not for the faint hearted and, unlike the original, is well worth its 18 rating (in the UK). The mutated, or re-mutated, vampires are not pretty in any way shape or form and they only get worse as the film progresses.
So I hated this film from beginning to end, right...? Well, the answer to that is no! Although it has a great many flaws, which I've taken a somewhat unfairly savage delight in highlighting above, Blade 2 does some things well and some even better than the original. There are powerful fights, stronger dialogue, a few genuinely 3-dimensional characters and a twist or turn here and there which, although not exactly unexpected, are handled, in both the build up and the execution, with aplomb. Del Toro deserves credit for fashioning a solid, if occasionally unnecessarily extravagant, Friday night movie that ticks many of the boxes marked 'A Good Time.' Like the first the ending is a bit weak and there are far too many unintentionally humorous moments, but overall Blade 2 is a cracking film that, to my mind, is not bad at all. I still prefer the original but, while I can hardly offer unconditional praise, I would suggest that if you liked the first you'll probably enjoy the second. Just don't show it to anyone who doesn't like seeing the details of a person's internal anatomy...