Blade II
Reviews
by : Kyle
DuVall Gareth Von Kallenbach
Starring:
Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Ron Perlman
Directed by: Guillermo del Toro
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Kyle DuVall
After
two decades of vampire-as-tortured outsider, David Goyer and
Stephen Norrington's Blade was a flashy, bloody whirlwind
that sliced through the post-Anne Rice goth pretensions of
the modern vampire myth with ferocity, flair and a bad-ass
named Wesley snipes. In Blade, vampires were not tortured
outsiders, they were self-absorbed elitists who perpetuated
and justified their own shallow existence with the blood of
others. Snipes monomaniacal Blade was the ultimate antidote
to this class-conscious status-obsessed breed of bloodsucking
poseur. Pureblood, half-blood, familiar, to Blade it didn't
matter. "To me," snipes proclaims in Blade, " you're nothing
but another dead vampire…"
It was
that butchering of the pretension that had creeped into the
vampire mythos in Blade that really drove the first film,
and Snipes bad-ass characterization of the Dhampir daywalker
was the sharpest instrument of all for flaying the melodrama
and effete vampire-as-hero aesthetic from an ancient monster-archetype.
In Blade
2, screenwriter Goyer returns, this time with director
Guillermo Del Toro, and together they once again use the Blade
concept to peel another layer off the vampire mystique, and
what they reveal beneath the viscera this time is the blood
and guts that pumps beneath the whole vampire paradigm. Blade
was a social study, but Blade 2 is a biology lesson, a Darwinian
fable where the grand guignol battle of survival of the fittest
is played out for enjoyment and unease with vampires, mutants,
kung fu and comic book posturing. The plot is messy, one key
performance is weak, and Del Toro's indulgence in gore and
blood may make this film unwatchable to some, but there's
a genuinely unsettling and compelling story being told beneath
the Hong Kong fight Choreography and testosterone posing if
one has the persistence and stomach to look for it.
Blade
2 picks up with Blade pounding the pavement of Prague looking
for his old partner Whistler (Kris Kristofferson). In a somewhat
hard to swallow plot twist, Whistler, who we thought killed
himself in the first film was actually turned by vampires
before he died and has been held in stasis by the Vampire
Nation for interrogation purposes ever since. In a sequence
drenched in comic-book coolness, Blade tangles with greasy,
eurotrash vampires, wrecks some expensive motorcycles and
manages to rescue his grizzled old pal from a prison that
looks like a bacta tank left over from The Empire Strikes
Back.
As Blade
and Whistler are re-united, and Whistler gets acquainted with
his ersatz replacement, an oily stoner named Scud (Norman
Reedus), blade's "blade-cave" (or Blade-decrepit-warehouse,
to be more accurate) is invaded by vampire ninjas. That's
right: Vampire Ninjas. Another cool fight sequence unfolds
with, Del-Toro's comic book fetishes unapologetically displayed.
The spectacle is as a Hong Kong kung fu comic book tableau
of kicking, acrobatics and choreographed poses. The ninjas
look like Snake Eyes from GI Joe, and Blade looks like the
flexing flying superhero icon from a blaxploitation comic
book that he is. It's all very cool, and all very ridiculous.
The fight
halts when the leader of the vampire ninjas, Nyssa (Leonor
Varela) informs Blade that their intention is not to kill
him, but to make him an offer. There's a new bloodsucking
mutation on the streets, one that feeds on humans and vampires,
and the Vampire Nation needs all the help it can get to stop
it. With a lack of hesitation or skepticism that might be
a problem in a film that didn't seek to emulate comic book
storytelling, Blade packs up his stake-happy family, throws
in with Nyssa and flies to a vampire stronghold that looks,
on the outside, like it could be called "the Vlad Tepes convention
center and technomilitary plaza".
Our heroes
meet "vampire overlord" Damoskinos, a maggoty, creepy arch-vampire
in the F.W. murnau vein. Blade is quickly debriefed that a
virus has created a mutant strain of vampires called Reapers.
The Reapers must feed almost constantly and they turn their
victims into vampires much quicker than normal nosferatu,
and, as stated earlier, they feed on human and vampires. If
the Reapers are not stopped, vampires and humans will walk
to extinction together instead of by each others hands.
Blade
teams up with an elite super-team of vamp commandos called
the bloodpack to get the job done. The bloodpack is another
fetish assembly of geek- hip archetypes from the minds of
Del Toro and Goyer. An impressive looking assembly of typage
casting, to quote Jim Kelly in Enter the Dragon, these guys
"come straight out of a comic book…"
Hong Kong
film fans will immediatley recognize Donnie Yen among the
pack as samurai bloodsucker Snowman, and fans of hulking brutes
who sometimes show up in art-house films will recognize Ron
Perlman as Rheinhartd, the bloodpack's leader. There are also
a variety other, less important, but still striking characters,
like Verlaine, a woman who looks like a cross between Amelie
and Lola from Run, Lola, Run, and her boyfriend Lighthammer,
a vampire with maori tattoos and a big honkin' hammer. (In
context, a blunt hammer is probably the most ineffective weapon
one could devise to fight vampires with, but hey it looks
cool..). There's are also a healthy number of pack-men who
are blatant red-shirts, i.e. characters that only exist as
fodder for messy deaths later in the film, but they still
look cool. The wacky thing about the gang is that the bloodpack
was created and trained to kill Blade. Now they must help
him. Oh the Irony. Shakespeare would be proud.
From there
the film develops into highly stylized set pieces and action
choreography as Blade and the bloodpack ferret out the mutant
reapers, who reveal themselves as a more resilient foe than
ever expected. They are immune to silver. Their hearts are
protected from penetration by a bony chamber and they feed
more ferociously and voraciously than any nosferatu ever seen
before. They are, in essence, the pinnacle of vampire evolution.
Limbs are hacked, blood is sucked and our heroes barely escape
at every turn, until the conclusion where all the requisite
secrets are revealed and all the alliances are tested.
Del Toro,
an accomplished director of serious horror handles the action
in Blade with unrestrained kid-in-a-candy store glee.
Bullets fly, blades slice through the air spreading gore and
blood, and the reapers, feral and implacable, move with a
brutal grace that calls to mind the kinetics of the hyper
agile chimps from Planet of the Apes. The camera, aided
by obvious, yet still engaging, special effects moves with
an even more frenetic mobility than the films back-flipping,
flying protagonists. And what can you say about Wesley Snipes?
He sells every karate chop, katana swipe and macho pose with
an effectivness Ah-nuld could only dream about.
Del Toro's
visual talents and fetishes are fully and engagingly on display
as well in the film's art direction. The Prague of the film
is a seething hellhole, half decaying goth fantasy, half iron
curtain industrial wasteland. It may be the most ideal un-natural
habitat for vampires ever seen in a film. It's a place where
vampires, reapers or original recipe, would quite logically
be the dominant species.
The props
and costume designs are another kick-ass exemplification of
Del-Toro and companys cyborg aesthetic of comics spliced with
pulp horror. A James Bond-style obsession with gadgetry is
merged with the ornate gothic sensibilities of horror comics
and superhero imagery and crafted into a hundred subtle and
not so subtle eye-candy accents. Lofty names in the field
of comics and illustration like Mike Mignola, Tim Bradstreet
and Wayne Barlowe all contributed to bring Del Toro's horror
fetishes to fruition, and their work is always intriguing
to the eye. The film offers up both skin-crawling grotesquerie
like the reapers horrific feeding-mouths, and the vision of
a reaper autopsy, as well as a hundred little superhero gimmicks
like Reinhardts axe-blade shaped dual .45s, or the Travis
Bickle-style retracting anti-coagulant injectors blade keeps
stashed under his sleeve. The monster-movie visuals of the
film are like a theoretical biologists grossest nightmare
and the hardware is like a collection of ultra-cool items
from a sharper-image catalog for vampire-obsessed psychopaths.
Its all pure over-the top cool.
Style
alone will probably not be enough to appease everybody. A
lot of filmgoers will leave the film, with its sometimes sloppy
plotting, occasionally marginal acting and spaltter film indulgences,
disgusted by what seems to be nothing more than a shallow,
gross-out spectactle. There's valididty in such criticism
for most, but for a certain type of filmgoer, one willing
to plunge their hands right into the films seething guts,
theres a chilling, elusive subtext to be found pumping through
Blade 2's veins, and Del Toro's Horror fetish gore and goo
is not so much mere exploitaion as a sign pointing to his
film's ultimate subtext, that of a war with vampires as metaphor
for the ugliest, most inescapable realities of our biological
imperatives.
Morality,
good and evil, love and hate are all fabrications of sentience.
To feed, survive and perpetuate are the only rules biology
has hardwired into our guts, and Darwinian law says in the
game of survival of the fittest, somebody's gotta lose. In
the real "circle of life" who winds up on top has precious
little to do with morality.
In Blade
2 this primal game of survive at any cost is played by Blade,
the mutant reapers and the Vampire Nation, and all the players
learn that, in the end, dominance in the food chain is still
a brutal nasty game the civilized are doomed to play despite
our "highly evolved" concepts of loyalty, love and even family.
It's Del
Toro and Goyer's portrayal of the reapers as a purely biological
menace that drives this subtext. Single-minded and barely
sentient, the reapers are vampire-as-apex predator. Their
threat is purely evolutionary and biological. Unlike the traditional
Hollywood vamp, they have no moral and emotional baggage.
Their threat is the primal threat of the beast and nothing
else. They are pure instinct: feed, survive, perpetuate. If
morality was biology then the reapers would be the heroes
of Blade 2. They are the ultimate physical evolution, deadly,
dominant and completely unclouded.
The Reapers,
then, form an interesting counterpoint to the nature of the
vampire Nation. Like the traditional cinematic vampire, Damoskinos
and his shadowy society of bloodsuckers are as much, if not
more, a moral and spiritual threat than a purely predatory
one. The Vampire nation is the dark reflection of humanity.
They kill without mercy for their own gain, but they are more
like us than unlike us. They are also obviously capable of
rational thought, able to feel emotions of love or loyalty
as well as anger and fear, and most importantly, they have
a self-awareness that implies free-will. Even the name, Vampire
Nation implies the vampire as a creature of a high evolutionary
and social order equal to our own.
The vampires
of the nation prey on the weak without mercy to survive, but
unlike the completely animalistic reapers, vampires choose
the life they live. It is this fact that inserts morality,
the idea of good and evil, into their makeup. The reapers,
unable to reason, devoid of higher logic, intelligence or
any sort of control are in essence, beyond good or evil. Whereas
the feeding of a normal vampire is a chosen act of "evil",
the feeding of the sub-sentient reapers has no more morali
implication than spider eating a fly.
While
it categorizes them as "evil" It is the Vampire nations possession
of reason and order that allows Blade to team with the bloodpack
for vampires' and humanities' mutual survival. Blade, of course,
is the narratives abstract personification of good. As slayer-of-monsters,
he occupies the moral high ground. He is the vessel of our
ideals of self-sacrifice, courage and obligation, he represents
the antithesis of the vampire nation's ethos of willful malevolence.
That Blade is willing to set aside his heroic duties and personal,
emotional motivations of revenge and anger to ally with his
"evil" vampire enemies sends a clear message: The preservation
of civilization, of order, of the highly evolved organism,
be it vampire or human, is more important than the moral battle
the two sides fight. A world tainted by darkness struggling
with light, is better than one where neither exist at all.
Of course,
the irony of this is obvious. By setting aside their moral
and emotional drives in order to ally and survive, the two
sides become like the primal force that they oppose. This
aspect is displayed deftly in the action of the film, where
characters who succumb to emotional and philosophical urges
like love, compassion or even revenge, are duly punished for
their actions by death, injury or betraytal. Even Blade, who
is as single minded in his purpose as anyone in the film succumbs
to a hesitant sympathy for his eternal enemies and is eventually
punished for it.
But Blade
2 doesn't stop with a simple statement about instinct versus
intellect. Something more elusive emerges in the films themes.
Slowly, both figuratively and literally the film peels away
the concept that the spiritual and philosophical battle between
good and evil and the evolutionary battle of competing species
are any different at all. Light versus darkness predator vs.
prey, if there is a difference, Blade 2 seems to say that
difference is not merely subtle, but inconsequential.
Early
in the film Nyssa tries to absolve the Vampire Nation to Blade
by appealing to his sense of empathy and logic. She says that
vampires, like Blade, do what they have to to survive, and
the only difference between vampires and humans is that vampires
accept and are at ease with what they must do. It's a moment
that mirrors a scene from the first film, where Deacon Frost
(Stephen Dorff) tried to sway Blade to his side by absolving
vampirism in terms of racial and social superiority.
Nyssa's
argument is certainly more valid and sympathetic than Frost's,
but for Blade, his answer is essentially, if not literally,
the same. "it's fate", Blade responds with true action-hero
stoicism.
On the
surface the answer, like the film as a whole, seems obligatory
and meaningless, but in the context of the operatic action
that unfolds, a meaning emerges. The fate Blade refers to
is not so much the vague, cosmic wheel-turnings of destiny,
but rather the inescapable biological realities hardwired
into our guts. Maybe Nyssa makes a good point, maybe Blade
is not as righteous as we believe him to be, but in the end,
theres still only one rung at the top of the evolutionary
ladder, and it ain't big enough for both humans and nosferatu
to share. Blade's response to Frost in the first film was:
"to me, your just another dead vampire…". His response to
Nyssa is more forgiving, more tragic, but its ramifications
are the same. For vampires and humans the inescapable rules
of biology mean there can be no understanding beyond kill
or be killed.
Blade
2's final act re-iterates the films themes of the evolutionary,
primal nature overtaking and ultimately shaping our "higher"
spiritual and intellectual nature. In the final act, Damoskinos,
initially established as malevolent yet civilized and intent
on preserving the social order of his nation above all else,
is ultimately revealed as consumed by the same primal need
for perpetuation at any cost that drives the reapers.
"Not
even family," Damoskinos hisses to his daughter Nyssa, "takes
precedence over the ascendancy of my race…". Family, in this
instance, means not only his literal family symbolized by
Nyssa, but also his figurative family of the Vampire Nation,
whom he serves as patriarch. It's Damoskino's monomaniacal
fixation on this racial "ascendancy" that eventually puts
both the nation and his children at risk as expendable, and
leads to the films gruesome conclusion.
In the
end all of this sturn and strange conflict between biological
fate and self-determination solidifies into a spiritual sentiment
that gives the film the soul of a bloody Greek tragedy. As
in The Devil's Backbone, Del Toro draws everything
together in the film's closing moments with a succinct series
of images that eloquently punctuate all the film's narrative
concerns.
In Blade
2's penultimate minutes, as in Darwin's great game, it
is Blade, the accidental freak, the unplanned blip of the
evolutionary radar, who emerges from the carnage to survive.
But for Blade, as it is with the tragic character of Nomak,
the only reaper who is able to comprehend his descent into
bestiality, there is a price to be paid for survival. In Blade
2 winning the primal game that is being played means Blade
must give up something almost as precious as the humanity
Nomak has given up to try to survive. A dark truth is revealed.
For souls who can truly comprehend the terrible sacrifices
that must be made to claw to the top of the evolutionary ladder,
maybe surviving is the most terrible fate of all.
Many reviewers
have blasted Blade 2 for its inconsistent plotting,
a seemingly juvenile fascination with violence, gore and gadgetry,
and occasional weak acting and silly dialogue. These are all
points well taken. But Blade 2 is definitely neither
mindless nor pointless. Del Toro and Goyer have injected real
and relevant dark subtext in their gratuitous collision of
comic books and drive-in splatter. For that reason, for those
of us with the stomach to take it, Blade 2 is so much
more than just a bloody, wild ride.
Rating:
Gareth
Von Kallenbach
With the
phenomenal success of "Blade" it was only a matter of time
before a sequel hot the screen. For those readers unfamiliar
with the original, the story revolved around the title character,
Blade (Wesley Snipes), a human vampire mix that gets all of
the strength of the vampires but none of their weaknesses.
For years Blade has been waging all out war on the vampires
of the world as he sees them as a disease he must eradicate.
The new
film picks up where the last one left off, with Blade taking
his vampire hunting to Eastern Europe. Set mainly in Prague,
the movie revolves around a new breed of vampires known as
Reapers who have been feeding on the vampires Blade has been
hunting. The Reapers are doing gigantic amounts of damage
to the vampire populace and with their increased need to feed
and the fact that each time they feed they create more of
their ranks; the vampires are faced with being exterminated
in no time. Unable to deal with the combined threat of the
Reapers and Blade, the vampire elders seek a truce with Blade
in order to combat the new enemy, as they explain to Blade
that humans are at risk as well. Intrigued at the chance to
get a good look at the inner workings of the vampire orders,
Blade joins forces with seven vampire soldiers, who incidentally
have been in training for two years for battling Blade. Assisting
Blade on his mission is his mentor Whistler (Kris Kristofferson),
and Scud (Norman Reedus), who are both very adept at creating
deadly weapons for Blade's use.
The uneasy
alliance between Blade and the vampires is a fragile situation,
as many of the vampires want nothing more than to kill Blade
despite the alliance. One such vampire is Reinhardt (Ron Perlman),
who is constantly a menace to Blade and the mission. Compounding
matters further for Blade is the lovely Nyssa, (Leonor Varela),
who is a born vampire and daughter of the vampire leader.
Blade has feelings for her, and is torn between the feelings
and the fact that she is his sworn enemy. Furthermore, she
challenges Blade to accept what he is and give up his hatred
of the vampires. As if this was not enough for Blade to deal
with, the Reapers seem to only have a weakness for sunlight,
and his weapons of silver and garlic are not very effective
against the Reaper Horde. What follows is non-stop action
as the two armies collide in a fury of blood and mayhem.
The film
was directed by Guillermo del Toro and he has concentrated
on the look and pacing of the film, wisely letting Snipes
handle the load of the work. The film is a mix of dark colors
with a blend of yellow and brown giving "Blade II" a look
that was reminiscent of David Fincher's "Alien 3". The plot
is not as good as the first films, as we do not get many new
insights in the world of vampires as we did in the first film.
Instead, the emphasis is on action and some very gory special
effects that drive the films scenes.
This is
a difficult film to review as on one hand the story, and acting
was nothing to write home about, while the action scenes were
well staged and enjoyable. I think the best way to describe
the film would be as a comic book come to life as the film
is based on the Blade comics. The emphasis is on the action
and look of Blade's world, and rather than concentrate on
an over complicated plot, the filmmakers decided to get right
to the action and not let up. Some people walked out of the
screener I attended, but the majority stayed in their seats
and cheered Blade on. Fans of "Red Dwarf" will be happy to
see Danny John-Jules in a supporting roll, and fans of the
original "Blade" should be happy with the sequel.
Rating:
Gareth
Von Kallenbach
Gareth@nwlink.com
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