Blade II

After the big success of 1998's Blade, Marvel went on to make the much more successful X-Men and Spider-Man, but took four years to get Blade II off the ground. The original script involved some wacky time travel, and at some point the original director left. But they eventually found a serviceable replacement in Guillermo del Toro, and they managed to bring back Wesley Snipes in the title role and Kris Kristofferson as his sidekick. The new faces included Ron Perlman as a tough-guy vampire, and Leonor Varela as the new romantic interest, who happens to also be a vampire. The first Blade movie had a $45 million budget and made more than $130 million in the box office. Its sequel was given a slightly larger budget of $55 million, and earned more than $150 million. So they had pretty much figured out a stable, reliable formula for turning a profit with these vampire-hunter movies.

The movie opens in Prague, Czech Republic! I don't know why, but I love it! Having lived in that city for six months, that place is near and dear to my heart, so I always get real excited to see it. And they actually shot this on location, giving us a few (yet still not enough) great views of the city's skyline. Plus, about half the people who worked on this movie were Czech, and it was a Czech who created the vampire language, which sounded an awful lot like Czech with a little Russian mixed in. There were even a couple of vampire phrases that I understood, even though it's supposed to be a fictional language.

So anyway, we're in Prague, and we see a rather sickly-looking fellow enter a blood bank. He's led into a very sinister-looking room, and we quickly discover the doctors are all vampires. The guy starts to cry, then laugh, and he jumps up and starts attacking and biting the vampires. He then looks into a security camera and says, "I hate vampires!"

We then cut to the opening credits with Blade providing a voice over recapping the events of the previous film, which apparently happened two years ago. He reminds us that he's half-vampire, has all their strengths and none of their weaknesses, but then he says that his friend and weapons provider, Whistler, actually did not die in the last movie. Even though we knew 100% that Whistler shot himself before he could turn into a vampire, this movie replayed that scene to prove to us that they never actually showed him dying, so we're supposed to believe that he actually did turn into a vampire, then was captured by other vampires and taken over to Prague, while Blade was busy killing Deacon Frost and his group. Whatever.

Right away, we can tell with these open action scenes that they're trying to out-do the previous movie. I'd be OK with that, if they didn't rely heavily on outdated CGI and speeding up/slowing down the film speed. We have to remember, this was 2002, height of the Matrix phase, and these filmmakers were very proud with what they could do on a computer. A full decade later, these effects look really crappy, which is especially troubling since they take away from Wesley Snipes' superb martial arts.

Anyway, Blade kills a whole bunch of vampires (but intentionally lets one live) while he's hunting down Whistler. He finally finds him floating in a big tank of blood, frees him, and takes him back to his base with his new weapons provider, Scud. Scud is an annoying punk, who is constantly smoking, eating Krispy Kremes, and is always, always watching Powerpuff Girls. It's so random! I tried to figure out why this cartoon was featured so prominently, and all I could find was that the director wanted to make this movie look like a Japanese anime, and he originally wanted to show Speed Racer on Scud's TVs. But the Speed Racer people turned him down — they had plans in the works for their own movie in the near future — so Guillermo del Toro went with his second option(?) Powerpuff Girls. I guess it kinda looks like an anime ...

So yeah, Blade gives Whistler an antidote, and even though he doesn't mention her, I'm assuming this came from his hematologist girlfriend from the last movie. But the important thing is, whether I like it or not, Whistler is back, alive and well, and now caught in a petty little rivalry with Scud to see who can make the best weapons. The movie spends a lot of time making us suspect that Whistler is secretly working for the bad guys, but that turns out not to be the case — really making me wonder why they went to such lengths to bring him back from the dead in the first place. It's not like he was particularly memorable from the first movie.

Enough griping from me, and on to the plot. A couple of ninja vampire sneak into Blade's base, and he fights them for a very long time, before one of them finally yells stop, and for no apparent reason, Blade decides to stop and talk to the vampires. The vampires offer a truce and seek Blade's help with a problem they're having. They all go to their aging vampire overlord, who shows them security footage of the new monster from the beginning. His name is Jared Nomak, and he was born a vampire, but developed a type of cancer that turned him into a reaper. He now feeds on vampires, turning them into reapers. Apparently they need to feed every day, so their numbers are growing exponentially. The vampires convince Blade to help them stop the reapers before they grow out of control and begin feeding on humans as well.

Blade is put in charge of a team called the Blood Pack, which has way too many people to keep straight, but the notable members are Nyssa, the daughter of the overlord, and Rheinhardt, played by the incredible Ron Perlman. I know him best as the voice of Slade on Teen Titans and the star of Hellboy. Perlman has such a wonderful voice, I love it whenever he talks. He also has a really goofy-looking head, which works great for a vampire. So Ron Perlman is the big tough guy, and he starts trash-talking Blade. Blade then shows him who's boss by sticking a silver bomb to the back of his head.

Blade then leads the Blood Pack to their first mission, staking out a vampire night club to try to find the reapers. This is where the music gets really annoying. The first movie had tons of techno, which sucked, and this one continues the trend. I guess it makes sense for the Czech vampires to be a little behind the trend with popular music, but that still doesn't prevent the music from being sucky. Also, this where the movie becomes a horror film. Or at least tries to be. Everybody splits up, and naturally attacked separately. We learn that reapers are stronger than vampires (of course), and are immune to silver and garlic, but sunlight still kills them. We also see that their jaws can open up like a venus fly trap, and they have weird sucker-tentacle things. It is pretty gross, but mildly interesting.

During this big fight, Nomak has a chance to kill Nyssa, but doesn't, and Blade calls her out on it. One of the vampires in the Blood Pack is bitten, and his friends try to alleviate him from his pain by killing him. They slice off a big chunk of his head, but he still lives until Blade exposes him to sunlight. In a very strange bit of CGI, we see the severed portion of the head remaining after the main body explodes, and its eyes still moves around and blinks. Why did they include this? It's so strange. Isn't this movie strange enough?

The Blood Pack managed to capture a reaper and take it back the base to perform an autopsy on it. This is another gross, yet interesting scene. We learn that reapers have the added protection of incasing their hearts in bone, leaving only an opening on the side. At some point after this, Blade and Nyssa begin to fall in love for no apparent reason other than the fact that he's the main character and she's the female lead.

Blade plans to hunt for the reapers at daylight, and Whistler and Scud create a couple of nonsensical UV light bombs, while the vampires create some spiffy-looking armor to the tune of some more horrible techno music. But none of them cover their heads, which turns out to hurt them in the end. I find this part odd, because we saw in the first movie how vampires could withstand the sunlight by wearing shaded motorcycle helmets or copious amounts of sunscreen. But these vampires decided they didn't need to take such precautions.

So they head on into the sewers, using reaper pheromones to attract them (don't ask), and naturally everybody splits up and everybody dies. This is supposed to be a tense, horror-movie scene with our "heroes" slowly being picked off one by one, but I found it incredibly boring. I don't know, I guess most horror doesn't work for me. Anyway, at one point, Nomak corners Whistler, and whispers a dark secret into his ear. Blade kills all the reapers (except for Nomak, conveniently) with a big UV light bomb that causes light to look and act a lot like fire. Hmm. Whatever. So like I said, everybody dies, except for Blade, Whistler, Ron Perlman and Nyssa. But Nyssa is severely weakened by the UV light bomb, so Blade slices open his wrist and allows his newfound girlfriend to drink some of his blood. This scene is very similar to a scene in the first movie, although it is much more tender and much less sexual than the first movie's. Unfortunately, I still can't figure out why Blade likes this girl vampire so much and is saving her life.

As soon as Nyssa is back to full health, Blade and Whistler are ambushed and captured by the vampires. They're taken back to the vampire overlord, and Whistler reveals the Truth, as told to him by Nomak. The reaper virus was actually created by the overlord in an attempt to rid vampires of their weaknesses. Nomak, his son, was a failed experiment. Nyssa is shocked and saddened to hear this, and when she confronts her father, he simply says, "I would have thought it was obvious at this point." And it was obvious — Nomak and the overlord look exactly the same.

Ron Perlman then prepares to kill Blade and Whistler, so Blade pushes the trigger to activate the bomb on his head, but it doesn't work! Ron Perlman rips it off and hands it to Scud, who reveals that he has secretly been working for the vampires all along, and the bomb he created was just a dud. But then Blade reveals that he secretly knew Scud was a traitor the whole time and the bomb is actually not a dud, and he activates it, blowing Scud up.

Blade is then taken to an operating table, where his blood and organs will be harvested so the vampires can study it to further their research. There's a lot of confusion and commotion caused when Nomak attacks the stronghold, and Whistler escapes from Ron Perlman and saves Blade. Blade then bathes in a random pool of blood, and emerges to fight tons of vampires to more awful techno music. Finally, it's just Blade and Ron Perlman left. Ron Perlman has Blade's sword, and he tries to use it to kill Blade, but he somehow catches the blade with his hands and wrestles it from Ron Perlman's grasp. He then cuts the evil vampire in half, and it looks pretty cheesy. To end this scene, Whistler tosses Blade his signature sunglasses, and he catches them in the most dramatic way possible.

Meanwhile, Nyssa and her dad are running away from Nomak, but then Nyssa suddenly betrays her father and locks the three of them in a room. Nomak kills the old vampire, who has green blood for some reason, and then Nyssa willingly surrenders to her brother, and I have no idea why. Blade doesn't arrive until after Nomak bites his sister, so while she lies on the floor slowly changing into a reaper, Blade fights Nomak for what seems like forever. Again, the action is mostly good, but then they'll randomly put in a CGI Blade to perform a very fake-looking flip, and then they'll speed up the film to make it look even worse. Eventually Blade beats Nomak by stabbing him in the side and reaching his heart's one weak spot. Nyssa then requests to die as a vampire by seeing the sun rise, so Blade takes her in his arms outside, and sadly watches as she dissolves away in the beautiful sunrise. It's a sweet, tender scene, but it really feels out of left field. Why does Blade love her?

And then, instead of ending the movie on this genuinely beautiful and touching moment, we head over to London to see Blade kill the vampire he let live in the beginning. It was supposed to be funny, I guess.

So yeah, that was Blade II. In some ways, I felt this was better than the first movie. Wesley Snipes seemed to have a better handle on what worked and what didn't work for his character — he had fewer cheesy one-liners and didn't try so much to be funny. He also had a stronger supporting cast around him, including his new love interest, even if that romance was not properly developed. However, this sequel really annoyed me with quite a few things. I felt they cheated to bring back Whistler, and their was no real payoff for that. I also hated the cliche plot of making our hero team up with his enemies to take down an even stronger evil. I would've been perfectly content to just watch Blade kill more normal vampires. Another big problem was the over-reliance of special effects, which killed the action in this movie — a movie that wanted to be both action and horror, and kinda ended up as neither. And finally, this movie let me down by not being about Blade very much. The real plot of this story was about the struggle between this vampire father, son and daughter. And Blade is stuck in the middle of it all. It reminds me a lot of another Guillermo del Toro movie, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which had very little to do with Hellboy and a lot to do with this weird brother-sister dynamic.

I wish I could take my favorite elements from Blade and combine them with my favorite elements of Blade II. I'd then tone it down to a PG-13 rating, and it would be the perfect Blade movie. But that is not possible. I just have to hope that the next movie they did make, Blade: Trinity, can live up to my dreams.

Final score: 1