Our Rating: 4.00
The sequel to the 1998 pulp hit “Blade” is a lark, but it’s an inventive, risky, maximum-overdrive, base-urge-pleasing lark, cobbled together on a rickety armature of Marvel-comics characters, ridiculous vampire mythos, and Mexican-born director Guillermo del Toro’s (“Cronos,” “The Devil’s Backbone)” filmmaking mastery. After a terrific credit sequence that offers a refresher course in basic Blade mythology, the half-human, half-vamp undead-hunter (cool, cool Wesley Snipes) is asked by the nefarious Vampire Nation (which killed his mother) to help it battle a new species of virus-created vampire superpeople called Reapers, who are aching to decimate the earth’s vampire and human populations. What follows involves a crack team of ninja vampire-hunters, scenes of graphic genetic engineering, and an old-school undead apocalypse. Snipes makes an appealingly vulnerable Blade, and cinematographer Gabriel Beristain and a crack production team animate del Toro’s knack for deftly transmogrifying earthly locations into anything but, allowing a great director to have a ridiculous amount of fun creating a sort of action/horror “Moulin Rouge!”
This article appears in Mar 20-26, 2002.