'Blade II' a convoluted blood bath
By Chris Fujiwara, Globe Correspondent, 3/22/2002
The ''Blade'' concept is strong, the first film wasn't terrible, and the sequel's director, Guillermo del Toro, has done some interesting work, so it was possible to hope that ''Blade II'' would turn out to be good. Well, forget it.
This sequel follows the formula for sequels today: Repeat whatever seemed to work the first time, and do it louder and longer. All the highlights from the first ''Blade'' are in place here, including elaborate martial-arts duels and an apocalyptic night at a vampire discotheque. Any subtlety, mystery, or surprise present in the first film is gone. What's left is a hyperbolic blood bath.
Still on his crusade against vampires, the half-human, half-vampire Blade (Wesley Snipes) makes a truce with the bad guys in order to fight a common enemy: a strain of supervampires called Reapers who have advanced powers and prey on both vampires and humans. Blade takes charge of an elite paramilitary vampire corps, whose ranks include a skinhead racist (Ron Perlman), and goes into action.
The convoluted plot ensures that, during the final half-hour, Blade is offered appetizer villains, main-course villains, side-dish villains, and dessert villains. The order of presentation of the dishes and the length of time spent lingering over each are the only parameters that matter; narrative coherence is off the menu.
What mainly sets ''Blade II'' apart from its predecessor (aside from the addition of hip-hop songs to rev up the audience) is the heightened emphasis on gore. The prevalent cartoonish tone and dust-in-the-eyes pacing take some of the edge off the visuals, and repetition dulls the impact of the Reapers' feeding methods, which involve grisly prosthetics evidently inspired by David Cronenberg's films. But in such scenes as the vivisection of a captured Reaper, del Toro and his special-effects wizards clearly mean to shake up the audience. The film raises the question: Is there a limit to the violence the MPAA will let a major-studio film get away with without slapping it with the dreaded ''NC-17''?
Crusty Kris Kristofferson, exhumed from the previous film as Blade's gruff mentor, gets most of what passes for the film's humorous dialogue - mostly profane insults. No one does any acting, certainly not Snipes, who's little more than a wall-size poster in motion, a slick killing machine. Leonor Varela is strikingly inadequate as the vampire who somehow arouses Blade's nonlethal emotions.
The last third of the film contains images worthy of a real movie: vampires crawling like spiders across tunnel walls; Blade walking past the gold-and-black embers of powdery vampire corpses.
Such imagery shows the potential of a concept, and a genre, that the rest of the film relentlessly trivializes in its pumped-up pursuit of video-game mayhem.
This story ran on page C4 of the Boston Globe on 3/22/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Chris Fujiwara