Blade 2
Don’t Fear The Reapers
Blade 2 models itself after the 1986 science-fiction flick Aliens, which is an excellent choice. Aliens was an outstanding action movie, and one of the few sequels to outclass the original. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning two, which is almost unheard of for any action movie, especially a sequel. It was director James Cameron’s follow-up to The Terminator, and helped establish him as a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood. If Blade 2 just has to be a derivative mess (and as a sequel it’s hard to imagine how it could be anything else), Aliens is a good choice for imitation.
Like Aliens, Blade 2 has a lone-wolf reluctant superhero with a difference. Aliens featured Sigourney Weaver as its action superhero; Blade 2 has Wesley Snipes back for a second go-round as a vampire-hunter. Both movies feature weird love interests; Weaver showing her maternal side in protecting a young survivor of an alien attack, Snipes falling for a shapely vampire (Leonor Varela). In Aliens, Weaver was teamed up with a band of Space Marines that were there primarily to challenge her and to die in noisy, complicated ways. In Blade 2, Snipes joins up with a vampire SWAT force known as the “Bloodpack”, who serve much the same function. In Aliens, the real villain (true to Hollywood’s anti-corporate bias) was revealed to be a profit-hungry corporation. In Blade 2, the vampire nation has its own corporate presence, to no one’s great surprise, complete with, er, bloodsucking corporate counsel. (As if it weren’t bad enough that vampires suck your blood; corporate vampires can presumably raid your 401(k) and suck the blood out of your stock portfolio.
The most obvious parallel between Aliens and Blade 2 is the villains. Here, Blade is hired by the leaders of the vampire nation to go after the “Reapers”, mutant vampires with superhuman (supervampire?) strength. The Reapers skitter through the sewers of Prague in exactly the same way that H.R. Geiger’s aliens scoot through the bowels of spaceships. And like those aliens, the Reapers have what seems to be needlessly complicated dental arrangements.
These are the primary, superficial traits that Blade 2 shares with Aliens, unfortunately, it doesn’t share much else. Blade 2 is more or less a run-of-the-mill, ordinary action movie, as unhealthy as junk food. To extend that metaphor, Blade 2 is marinated in blood and gore, breaded with chopsocky action sequences, and deep-fried in its own cliches. It features some dazzling fighting scenes and some interesting new anti-vampire weapons, but to no good end. It’s one thing, perhaps, to be desensitized to violence, it’s another thing to be bored by endless repetitions of the same violence, over and over again. There’s a scene where Snipes has to cut through a double-dozen stormtroopers to get to one of the vampire henchmen (Ron Perlman, from “Beauty and the Beast”). Snipes looks bored as he kills off the last of the stormtroopers, and Perlman looks bored waiting for him to finish, and if they’re bored by all this, you might be, too.
Blade 2 is also problematic because of the nature of its star. In this rendition, Blade is much less sympathetic than he was in the first movie. There, we saw him living on the edge, struggling with his vampire nature, stealing watches from dead vampires just to get by. In Blade 2, Snipes is tougher, meaner, and stronger, but he’s no longer interesting or special. In fact, he might as well be a computer-generated character for all the humanity he shows in this part. To make matters worse, Blade is practically physically invulnerable here, suffering all sorts of damage without so much as a scratch. You get the feeling that a building could fall on Blade without doing more than knocking his sunglasses off, which is no fun at all. (And action heroes need to be vulnerable now and then. Even Superman had kryptonite.)
Another element that’s almost missing from Blade 2 is the whole vampire ethos; Blade’s Bloodpack might as well be werewolves or dementors for all the presence they bring to the movie. Blade was decent enough to give us a look at the vampire underworld, but that’s not a topic that Blade 2 is really concerned with. The nature of the Reapers doesn’t help much, either; they’re a touch more vicious and bloodthirsty than regular vampires, but they don’t possess any of the signature vampire flair. They’re grotesque and weird, but they’re somehow not truly terrifying. In a movie that badly needs a sense of style and an impulse to terror to counterbalance the gritty settings and the overwhelming level of violence, the Reapers hurt Blade 2 more than they help.
By the end of the movie (which, of course, features a climactic duel with the top Reaper that’s two-thirds chopsocky and one-third Wrestlemania), there’s been so much blood shed and so many bones broken that the audience is ready to breathe a sigh of relief and exit the theater. Blade 2 features good visuals and good fighting choreography and decent mutant vampire villains and all, but it has almost no suspense, very little in terms of a sense of humor, no sense of the dramatic, and seemingly no real interest in its subject matter. Worst, there’s never a true sense of fear anywhere in the movie; there’s little cause for terror (or any other emotion, for that matter) in the money. Although it shares superficial similarities with Aliens, no one should believe that it is anywhere near the same quality. Aliens was the kind of movie that wanted to fly down your throat and pop out of your chest; Blade 2 just wants your seven dollars.