I saw it today. It kicks ass! Way better than Blade I.
Tips:
Pee before you watch the movie, cause if you gotta get up and leave for RR, you’re gonna miss a whole lot o’ action!
Ditto re: junk food.
Damn good flick! My rating 4 out of 5 !!
Snipes’ best film ever.
I totally agree! FINALLY a good movie representation of a comic book character. It’s way better than X-Men and the Punisher movie with Dolph Lungren. I can’t wait for Blade 3!
torben
It was atrocious.
“Blade II” has some decent fight scenes, but the script and story are just embarassingly terrible. Could they have come up with more cliches? I don’t think so, because they used every movie cliche in film history. They obviously didn’t even TRY to avoid making it sound incredibly stupid. Kris Kristofferson can’t act, and neither can Leonor Valera.
Which is too bad, because I like Wesley Snipes.
I enjoyed it, but I thought the first one was better.
The love-interest thing with whatsherface was distracting and cliché and annoying. And her death was pretty lame. The others who died because of exposure to sunlight had what appeared to be painful, horrible deaths… yet because her love, Blade, is holding her, her death was a serene, almost beautiful moment? Let’s have some consistency here, please.
The first Blade movie was much better. Blade II is a humorless romp that is infected with that worthless WWF crap. The Reapers are cool, and the story is okay – until the third act, where things take a major turn for the worse, plotwise.
The return of Whistler is actually handled well, but it was still the wrong thing to do – the only poignant moment of the first film was Whistler’s death, and now that scene is ruined by this film. It’s not good when your sequels make your prior films worse. They’re supposed to do the opposite.
The “bullet time” effect from Matrix is used. Poorly. That is so annoying. It has to go. It was cool once. Now everyone drop it, and come up with something original.
The first blade movie had a touch of whismy fun to it. This one does not. It’s just Blade being angry and hitting people. That’s not a good movie.
Kirk
SPOILERS
I haven’t decided yet which one I like better. Deacon Frost and his coterie were cooler, but the Blood Pack kicked lots more ass. I got a huge kick seeing Red Dwarf’s Cat as a vampire (Neesa’s partner Asad, played by Danny John Jules). Whistler showing up again was kinda stupid, but he’s a cool guy so I didn’t complain too much. The Reapers were pretty good as monsters, but not really as characters. I thought the WWF moves were a little cheesy, but some guys behind me at the theater were into those. Blade didn’t use his sword as much this time around, but he had other ways of garbage disposal.
Wall-to-wall bloody-minded mindless asskicking, unhampered by the tedious and silly character exposition of the first film. There was the silly quasi-love-interest thing going on, but the movie bulldozered through it far faster than the quasi-love-interest of the first. Plots between the two, with all silliness and incoherence weighed, come out pretty much equal.
Neither film was “good” by any stretch, but the sequel is superior to the original for what they are. It’ll join my dvd library for future cheerful mindless violence fixes.
Just like the first one, except without half the style, subtelety, sexiness, character development and story. Absolutely horrible CGI effects and gruesomeness that was stupid and boring when it wasn’t comical. This movie is bad, in fact, it would take the light from ‘good’ 1 million years just to reach this movie.
I’m with AudreyK. I liked it, but not
as much as the first one. I wrote up a longer
review here.
-Ben
I can’t argue with everyone’s negative criticisms of Blade II. I didn’t go into the theater expecting to see a work of art. I went in expecting to have a good time and lots of fun. On the fun & excitement scale, is where Blade II is a winner IMHO.
Yes, it was cliche. Yes, it was gratuituous. Yes, it was convoluted. Yes, it was tired. So what? I was glued to my seat every moment.
FWIW: I agree that Blade I did have more substance and wit.
If you’re looking for art, watch Masterpiece Theater on PBS.
If you want to have mindless fun, watch Blade II.
Sucked. Fight scense sucked. If I want to see a middle aged balding fat man prance around pretending to do Matrix style fighting, all I need to do is get off my ass and stand in front of a mirror. Jeez Snipes, lose some weight. Kristopherson can act, but this wasn’t a great turn for him. Evey cliche in the book, done humorlessly. I think this was a directing and writing problem. And why was the old vampire king looking like a traditional vampire when every other vampire looked normal? (Actually that was the least of my problems.)
What if I’m looking for fun and action that I don’t have to pretend to be stupid to enjoy?
Hey, I wasn’t pretending!
Ludicrous, but entertaining. In a brain-dead, grade Z Aliens rip-off kinda way. The split-jaw mandibles were ultra-nifty.
BTW, Kris Kristofferson certainly can act given the right material. Rent Lone Star for a wonderful supporting performance by Kristofferson.
Courtesy of imdb.
Blade
Directed by Stephen Norrington
Blade II
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Now, I don’t know either one of them, except that del Toro made The Devil’s Backbone, which I found quite enjoyable, if not nearly as scary as it was probably supposed to be, and that Norrington made Blade, which I really liked. A lot more than Blade II. (Side note: somebody in Hollywood agrees with me, as his next two projects are listed as being Ghost Rider (2003) and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The (2003) .)
Del Toro, IMHO, should stick to slower, more methodical films, as he apparently can’t direct the filming of Hollywood action. On the brief behind-the-scenes of Blade II that was on TNT, it was said that del Toro watched Dr. Dre and Eminem videos as inspiration for shooting Blade II. No wonder, then, that the film suffered so badly from the MTV “cut as often as possible” school of action shooting. Such “technique” was directly responsible for crapification of the action scenes for Pitch Black, The Musketeer, the first fight scene from Romeo Must Die, and several other films, including Blade II.
Now while the MTV style of action shooting is an adequate way of covering up inept fight choreography or poor movement on behalf of the actors, I feel that the technique was wholly unnecessary for Blade II. The action seemed to be choreographed quite well - with the possible exception of the WWF stuff, I mean, come on, a suplex?!? - and Snipes has proven time and again that although he might not be a martial artist by trade, that he can make his moves look quite good on film. (I heard that after Demolition Man, that he started taking martial arts for real, can anybody verify this?)
Hollywood seems to have forgotten that, even in action films, that a properly framed long shot can be a beautiful thing. The intricacy and beauty of the martial arts are more eloquently shown through a good long shot (e.g., CT,HD) than through cuts that barely last long enough for a punch to land.
Take, for instance, Blade II’s sword fighting scene, one of the film’s few good fight scenes. A series of long(er) shots. Blade and his opponents backlit by the wall of lights, long series of strokes, dodges, parries, ripostes, enhanced by a small amount of wire fu (unless Snipes really can jump some 10 feet in the air) and sped up film. Beautiful. All the MTV stuff, by comparison, is a muddled mess.
As for the script, it lacked the edge of humor, campiness, and over the top action of the first. There were still good lines, and Blade was still machismo personified, but it was just lacking…something that made the first movie great (well, for a comic book action movie).
Personally, I found even Resident Evil to be more enjoyable than Blade II. Not quite great, but better.
In the same TNT Behind The Scenes snippet that you quote, it mentioned that Snipes is proficient in several martial arts, and holds a 5th degree black belt.
:eek:
Ha! Goes to show how closely I was paying attention, doesn’t it?
I know what you’re saying, but a movie doesn’t have to sacrifice artistry to be fun. A movie doesn’t have to slack off creatively in order to be fun. I suppose for some films the emphasis is more on the mindless aspect of enjoyment than on sheer, vanilla fun, but too many movies that could have been so much better fall into this category.
Granted, BII wasn’t intended to be as thought-provoking or touching as CT, HD, but it’s the care and attention to the details that make a movie thought-provoking and touching that separate the good, the bad, and the ugly. Action movies in particular are guilty of this. They rely to greatly on superficial additions (read: special effects) to carry a film, eschewing believable characters and a logically-flowing storyline. And as a result, they suffer for this. No one remembers the characters that didn’t blow up the oil tanker. No one remembers the reason why the character hijacked the plane. They just remember the big explosions and cool decapitations.
BII could have been good. It could have been such a better movie had they paid a little more care into the solidity of the storyline and had less of a hard-on for cutting-edge special effects. Mind you, it’s not the special effects or the plot and character developement (as they were) that irks me. It’s the wasted potential that irks me.
I don’t think it’s too much to ask for consistency or solid, logical plots. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for character development and convincing performances. I know the reason people go to movies include to escape from the world, to not think, and to have a no-risk thrill. But that doesn’t mean Hollywood should be content to happily churn out retarded movie after retarded movie.
This movie takes a stupid Hollywood cliche and takes it to its terrible, stupendously stupid Hollywood extreme. Hopefully this means the cliche can now be retired.
Outrunning an explosion is a staple of action movies, and this movie has just that scene. Blade sets off the bomb to kill all the reapers and Nyssa sees it coming and ducks for cover.
Keep in mind that it is light that kills reapers and it is a light bomb that Blade sets off. Yes, Nyssa sees an explosion of light coming at her and finds her way to safety.
All the other stupidities are so comparitively minor (such as: if the Reapers no longer have lower jaws – as is mentioned by Nyssa, what are their lower teeth connected to?) as to not merit mention.
The fight scenes were over-edited, and the fight in front of the floodlights was so over manipulated that I think it may have been pure CGI.
The story was stupid, the action was passable at times. Snipes is a decent screen fighter, frequently fighting people in full costume. There is no reason they couldn’t have pulled the camera back, layed off the editing machine and allowed us to see an occasional sequence in its entirety.
Wait for the second run theater if this is your kind of movie, otherwise don’t give it any of your time.
Oh yeah, outrunning the speed-of-light explosion, I loved that one. (No, really.) 
On a slightly less uppity note, wtf was that thing Whistler put down in the sewer right before he started getting pounded on? If it was supposed to help him, it sure failed miserably…