Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 21, 2002, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Blade II is so many good things: a sequel that improves on the original, a spectacular vault into the movie mainstream by an idiosyncratic foreign filmmaker, a U.S. picture that skillfully adopts Hong Kong action stylings and an unabashed big-budget gorefest, all rolled up in one. Watching this movie makes you realize just how limited is the imagination of something like Resident Evil.
The first Blade did an efficient and often exciting job of establishing its half-human, half-vampire hero (Wesley Snipes) and his history, though it bogged down somewhat in overlength and a not terribly interesting villain. At 117 minutes, Blade II is six minutes shorter than its predecessor and moves like the wind, and features a particularly well-chosen cast of character actors while upping the dramatic ante by having Blade forge an uneasy alliance with those he has sworn to kill. As the movie opens, the “daywalker” has just rescued his old mentor Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) from a living death when they are approached by agents of vampire overlord Eli Damaskinos (Thomas Kretschmann). A new strain of bloodsuckers called Reapers has evolved, and threatens both humans and vampires; Damaskinos presses Blade into leading a vampire fighting force called the Bloodpack against these monsters.
Right away, this premise sets up a strong tension among the heroes to balance the terror of the Reapers, particularly between Blade and Reinhardt (Ron Perlman, with a becoming skinhead). There’s also an effective visual contrast between the “normal” vampires, who look just like us except for those nasty fangs and the occasional tattoos or other adornments, and the Reapers, which are an impressive bunch of creatures indeed. Led by Nomak (Luke Goss), they not only hark back to the classic Nosferatu look but have a startlingly nasty manner of feeding, conveyed through a seamless combination of makeup FX by Steve Johnson’s XFX and CGI by Tippett Studios.
Throughout the movie, in fact, del Toro and the various digital houses mesh computer tricks with physical FX and stunts in a manner that’s exhilarating instead of distracting. All the CG-assisted fight scenes that have popped up in the wake of The Matrix have proven how few people know how to do them right, but this team makes it look easy. Practically alone among the current crop of action directors, del Toro shoots the combat in such a way that we can see and appreciate the physical moves, rather than Cuisinart it into a flurry of disconnected impact cuts.
It doesn’t hurt that the director hired HK ace Donnie Yen (Iron Monkey) for the martial arts choreography (and cast Yen as one of the Bloodpack, though his screen time is disappointingly limited) and that Snipes throws himself into the brawls with abandon. And the imagination that scripter David S. Goyer applies to the world of Blade and the vampires extends into how the former takes out the latter; you can almost feel the glee Goyer had writing moments like Blade doing a back flip over a motorcycle-riding foe, blasting him into fiery, decomposing fragments and dropping into his place on the bike’s seat.
Goyer’s screenplay does contain a certain amount of narrative shortcuts and clunky exposition, but also a good share of tart, profane dialogue (Kristofferson has the best lines, and delivers them with relish) and effective plot twists. It also allows Blade a little more emotional range (he develops feelings for Damaskinos’ daughter, played by Leonor Varela) without compromising the character’s ruthlessness. In Blade, Snipes may have found his defining role: a man who expresses himself not in words, but in action, through physical grace and power, and looking good while doing it. Among the nicely eccentric supporting cast, Perlman, Kretschmann and Goss (the latter two emoting scarily through their ghoulish makeups) make the strongest impressions, Varela is a bit stiff as the heroine and Alex de la Iglesia veteran Santiago Segura has a brief but amusing turn as one of Blade’s targets.
Throughout, del Toro meshes the gloomy atmosphere of—and even a few visual references to—his previous Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone with the hard-charging mayhem into a stylistically seamless whole. The news that del Toro, Goyer and Snipes are already planning to reteam on Blade III is cause for excitement—though they’ve set a pretty high bar for themselves to top.
