As the number one fan of Blade, I was naturally the first one in line on the opening night of Blade II: Bloodhunt. Although I am aware that sequels usually aren’t that great, I was hoping that Blade II would follow in the footsteps of The Godfather, Part II and The Empire Strikes Back. How hard can it be to have Wesley Snipes smile slyly after destroying a room full of vampires or pose strangely in the middle of an excessively choreographed fight scene? This is really all I wanted.
Unfortunately, the filmmakers have opted for a movie that actually makes sense and has a plot, and thus, where the first film excelled, the sequel is sorely lacking. For those of you who have not yet had the pleasure of seeing Blade, here is a short summary of the movie. Blade (Wesley Snipes) is half-vampire, half-human, and all bad-ass. The plot is basically that the vampires want to kill Blade. However, he and his buddy Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) invent crazy weapons that explode or disintegrate the vampires, who are all attractive and glamorous, living a sexy life with their entertaining accents. In Blade II, the vampires want to team up with Blade to hunt a new strain of vampires. These mutant vampires have pasty-white, veiny heads. They are not attractive. They prey on vampires, who have, since the last movie, become less attractive and have started ripping apart the flesh of their victims, which is not very sexy.
The first mistake that the producers of Blade II made was budgeting a scriptwriter. The first film does fine without much of a plot. The problem with a plot is that it necessitates dialogue. Excessive talking conflicts with the number one rule of action movies: more talk equals less action. Only slightly less well known is this: action movies should never be subtitled. I recognize that another current movie has done well by inventing a language for mythical beings, but is it really necessary that the vampires talk in vampirish? I am willing to suspend my disbelief and ignore that the vampires have somehow decided to talk in English when they obviously would talk in their own language. The subtitles were especially annoying because, unlike their use in, say, The Red Violin, the subtitles added nothing to the movie. Reading the poetic phrase “fuck this shit” in yellow across the bottom of the screen made me want to leave the theater.
Furthermore, the action sequences in this movie are pathetic. Some idiot decided that the mutant vampires can only be killed with UV light. This eliminates the need for any cool moves or weapons on Blade’s part, since the main weapons in this movie were flashlights. So even though the vampires that are exposed to light die in a flash of flaming bones, the most exciting twist possible in a fight scene would be drained batteries (which doesn’t happen).
Most of the action in the movie involved the following sequence of events: when the vampires attacked, Blade would point a flashlight at them, and they would die. Less exciting than your average game of flashlight tag. Even when they invented a “light bomb,” (sounds intriguing, right?) it was still just light shining out of a cube. This is sad, because even Blade does not look very cool pointing a flashlight. And as the point of the movie is to see him kill vampires while being cool, there really is no point. On the rare occasion that Blade is permitted to use his moves, he seems to experience confusion as to what exactly is harmful to vampires. Even after 15 tries, Blade, the world’s number one vampire fighting machine, still has not mastered the fact that kicking a vampire in the face does not do much harm.
Another problem. Although I am a fan of Kris Kristofferson, he shouldn’t be in this movie. His character, Whistler, dies in the first movie, and for the sake of continuity, they should have left it at that, even if his redneck trash-talk is a delicious foil to Blade’s emotionless silence. To add insult to injury, his resurrection gobbled up the first half-hour of potential vampire whoop-assin’ time. In any case, if they are going to bring people back to life, why couldn’t they have re-animated the hot vampire god while they were at it?
So should you see this movie? The long answer is: if you wish that vampire action movies had a little more substance and a lot fewer unintentional laughs, you need to see this movie. The short answer is: no.
