Blade II

I watched Blade II on DVD this evening, having somehow failed to catch up with it during its cinema run despite my having hugely enjoyed the original film.

I did enjoy the sequel, but not as much as I expected to. Partly it was that the story was fairly predictable and unfocused, lacking the single enemy for Blade to work against which Deacon Frost provided first time round. Partly it was the overuse of CGI people in action scenes - it worked better than in, say, Attack of the Clones, but it still wasn’t particularly convincing. To a degree it was that the female lead just didn’t have the same sort of chemistry with Blade as the heroine of the first film. Finally, the storyline this time round didn’t really give us much reason to care which side won: the battle was essentially to decide whether humanity would be the prey of vampires or Reapers. You can get away with that sort of thing in a TV series like Buffy, where the writers have time to let us get to know the characters on all sides, but in a film running less than two hours there just wasn’t time. Finally, the way the story pressed the Reset button with respect to the fate of Whistler was awful: within the first ten minutes of the film he’s been de-vamped, and that just ain’t right.

I don’t want to be entirely negative: there were plenty of spectacular fight sequences - which, after all, is the main selling point for the franchise - and Wesley Snipes and Kris Kristofferson make a good team. The film was beautifully shot, with several action sequences which worked every bit as well on film as I’d imagine they would have in the original comic format. Snipes can certainly handle both the martial arts duties and the laconic one-liners convincingly. It’s just that it would be nice to see the writers deploy the characters in the service of a really good storyline next time round.