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Guillermo Del Toro's films have, in the past, been unusual, haunting & original.
Blade 2 is none of these. Why Del Toro
agreed to take on the franchise is anyone's guess. His style is distinctive & auteuristic, a personal
vision of movie-making akin a latter day Sam Raimi. Granted, GDT's previous
efforts have toyed with vampirism & genetic engineering but have leaned away from the Buffy the
friggin' Vampire Slayer format the second Blade installment adopts.
The first film was practically unfaultable (bar the horrendous finale), it had a black-is-back style
(courtesy Dolce & Gabbana) that dipped into the Black Panther myth, Shaft's cool, James Brown's rhythm
& Bruce Lee's ferocity. We had the cult offering of Stephen Dorff & Traci Lords, a thumping techno
soundtrack & those eye-catching
time-lapse intervals - the whole picture brimmed with substance & style. Blade 2 has all of its weaknesses &
none of it's strengths. It's a case of out with the style and in with the slaughter. A strict staple of
ultraviolence replaces any substance. The plot is difficult to follow in it's sprint towards a bloody
armageddon but if you've seen Alien:
Resurrection you'll be alright. Ron Perlman pops up to play the identical character he played in the latter
(with name change & a spot of vampirism of course) and the action is relocated back 2 prequels to Aliens.
I mean, the unfolding stroyline is SOOOO similar it's a wonder no one has sued. Blade 2 is very much a
montage of borrowed ideas & these are the highpoints of it's plagiarism.
The film patronizes it's cult audience (for easier mainstream marketing) with a clumsy voiceover intro
(effectively reducing the original to a 30 second sound-byte), happily recycles it's footage & then goes
on to commit celluloid blasphemy by resurrecting a quite happily dead & buried character (Kristofferson's
Whistler) by inventing a dubious backstory that fails to offset the most basic logical argument of his
predicament and once brought back criminally ignores his presence bar a few token scraps of
dialogue to remind us he's still there...
But Blade 2 has no time for detail as it heads
full-throttle into arcade overdrive. Danny Saber is brought in at the musical healm to slow things down
to a dull repetitive thump while everything else is speeded up to a blur. There are so many strands
in the film: characters, story, plot, that it suffers massive character underdevelopment that robs
all depth or meaning. The makers are in a such a hurry, to pack so much in they don't even have time to
put the finishing touches to some truly poor computer-generated fight choreography.
The sequel is bottom-of-the-rung pop spectacle. Del Toro's skills as a filmmaker are completely absent
& it's no coincidence that the bad guy is out of Bros
& the main plot set-piece takes place in a club where the room is dark, music is loud & there's plenty
of girating teens. There is less of the car more of the gimmicks. Whereas the Blade of the first film
was a kind of urban cowboy, it's sequel's namesake is more like James Bond on PCP. The melancholic tragedy of
the first film is totally abandoned in favour of bloody spectacle. We are asked to endure a finale that
discards the exhausted by now/undoubted
martial skill of Blade (& Snipes) and instead resorts to a kind of WWF/WCW free for all. And this is
Blade 2's weakness: it covers so many bases, appeasing/pleasing so many people whilst simultaneously fixing
its sights on the 16-24 cross section the whole thing ends up
totally hollow. Even the token Snipes Sun Tzu quote comes across more Steven Seagal than Amen Ra.
As for Del Toro, his latest is a disappointment, teasing us with only a sprinkle of his talent.
The poetic ambles are lost in the frenzy. The only place he plays his magic is the final sunrise
sequence which belongs better in the original but looks great nonetheless.
However, somehow Blade 2 manages to grasp tightly all it's multifarious facets to leave the spectacle
vaguely coherent and with everything going on nothing less than enjoyable.
Ironic that the comic strip & first film turned the blaxploitation element on it's head with it's subtle
brilliance & too-cool-for-skool sensibility. Sad that everything Steven Norrington achieved has so
effortlessly been turned back into exploitation of the lowest common denominator.
RATING: (c)Limer 2002
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Blade 2 (Cinema: April 2002)
