Blade II (2002)
In A World Beyond The One We Know, The Forces Of Darkness Fear One Man...Blade!
Of course, with the smashing success - or good enough success, it’s hard to tell with movie companies sometimes - of the first Blade, a second was inevitable. Perhaps surprising to a modern audience would be the fact that it didn’t water down the R rating, which is a thing that does kind of happen a lot of times when things get put out these days in an effort to broaden the potential net for catching wider audiences and in turn more moolah. Anyways, the last set us a pretty good base line to judge our anticipations for this one - there’s gonna be blood, there’s gonna be some blood suckers, and there’s gonna be Blade II.
Our story is a bit of a continuation of the first movie with a quest to retrieve a friend (spoiler, for whatever reason Whistler isn’t dead anymore!) Look, it is a comic book movie, alright, there’s gonna be nonsense like dead characters not being dead sometimes, it’s just how it works. Anyways, after that little detail is ironed out, we get into a brand new story - one that doesn’t even require any previous viewing to get understood - a new threat is on the block, one that eats vampires and people alike and spreads like a virus, much like vampires except on an accelerated schedule. To deal with this threat to their place on the top of the food chain, the vampires decide to try and make a truce with Blade, joining forces to unravel the foe before it can cause any real significant damage - but there’s trickery afoot, and a mystery needs to be detected before the truth can come to a bright, damaging light.
It’s a pretty straight forward plot in principle, and it might actually even be able to keep some of it’s secrets from some viewers on the first watch - but it isn’t so elaborately lain out that everyone is going to be lost in the mystery and not call it all out as soon as it’s presented. It does a good enough, if not appreciable job of adding some twists and turns to something that could have been boringly to the point, so even if it’s a little lightweight in that regards it’s still a wonderful little touch. The cast grows a bit wider this time as well - with an entire pack of bad guys getting some center stage time along side our main hero. They form up a sort of anti-Blade unit, now repurposed to work with Blade and deal with the new threat, and most of them have their own distinct look and personality - but not so much their own story. We have a triangle of heroes who have very light-weight story elements, and then we have a pair and a single set of baddies with which to have their own story play out - two of the normal vampires and the odd ball out being the evil new breed.
The actors do a good job here, but I will point out that they don’t exactly have a ton to work with at all times. Most the vampires have a single trait - which is less than a trait and more of a look - to work with. The couple that’s the bruiser and the lover? I actually have no idea why that lady is in the movie with her red hair - I mean, maybe she had some stuff that got cut or something. You’ve got stinking Donnie Yen in here, and he doesn’t get to shine like he should in a movie where he’s a vampire killing mutant new-vampires. I mean, they all are pretty much just expendable minions, but they at least look cool. Blade doesn’t have much of an arc in this one at all - on a whole the character development is really set aside for some decent action and the furthering of the main plot. Expect this to be the strongest point of contention I would say - the actors do good, but the characters are mediocre in most cases.
Dustin’ some foo’s.
You probably guessed it, but costumes get a nice step up from the last movie on account of the new band of vamps included in the main roster. We still get the party or rave vampire variety of normal to punk goth, but then you also get the Dungeons and Dragons party of vampires with their outfits - chainmail shirts, ninja garb with fancy vision goggles, black storm-trooper esque armor plates, samurai chests - it’s a whole buffet of costumes to enjoy. In particular, I do love the look of Yen’s character, and I do wish we could have gotten a real sweet sword duel between him and Blade at some point, but we can’t always get everything we want now can we? Settings have a bit of a variety here as well - not quite as dramatic a difference as ruins to modern, but we have plenty of sewers, clubs, streets, and industrial to look at. Props get a bunch more to play with as well, with a whole bunch of different weapons of various levels of ineffectiveness that would have a modern game’s loot box-laden skin packs screaming about their cheats.
The effects are still quite the mixed bag. You have some stuff, like props and the occasional CG-Snipes that look great, and then you also have some brief moments of CG stand-ins doing fights that although not horrible still are noticeable stand outs as being not a normal person. Most the mutant vampire stuff looks pretty good when it shows up, and I don’t think the common person should find too much to complain about in the grand scheme of it - even when it looks bad it’s still far from being the worst thing I’ve ever seen. The fight choreography is decent enough, although at times it likes to cut to the same thing from a slightly different angle to punch things up a bit - something you can easily overlook if you aren’t trying to be super analytical about it. It’s also starting to get to that era where we like to use a lot of cuts for things to cover for not just having easy-to-hide stunt doubles. It’s not a super drastic problem yet - it’s not 13 cuts to hop over a single fence, but I feel like pointing it out anyways.
Audio is not a mixed bag - it’s very much a perfectly fine thing. Balance is good - you’ll hear what you are meant to. There are times where subtitles are necessary if you’d like to understand whats being said - “vampire foreign language” crops up again here, and we don’t bother to hard-code the subtitles on the screen like movies like John Wick would do to make sure you don’t miss what’s being said. Effects are nice and punchy when they need to be, and everything sounds about as lively or authentic as you would assume when reading a description on paper. The soundtrack has some recognizable beats to it - although less so for me and more so for my watching partners who recognized them from various games they played. On my end, the music once again doesn’t stick around with me afterwards, but does a wonderful job of matching the scenes they appear in and occasionally having some good fun with the titles of the songs playing at given moments.
All kitted up.
I would say that if character development was more your thing, the first Blade would beat this one out. If you want fun outfits and gadgets, and a bunch of fight scenes, this one might edge out the original some. The acting is pretty on par across the franchise thus far, and the fact that this sequel can mostly stand on it’s own legs without needing prior back-watching or knowledge is always an impressive feat. Still, you may find yourself feeling slightly cheated out of things here and there, but it’s still a pretty decent watch.