Blade 2 doesn’t so much improve on the first one as it does evolve-- like the creatures at center stage-- beyond. Both movies are based on Marvel’s comic book series, about a half-human, half-vampire hunter who uses a stylish mix of whirling chrome knives and state-of-the-art tech to hunt his bloodsucking brethren.
I’m guessing part of the appeal of the comics (written by Marv Wolfman) is that vampirism is treated not as a supernatural curse but a bizarre plague-- a problem with solutions and side-effects, like any other science fiction problem. Blade is science-fiction horror; it retains only the practical elements of vampire lore-- garlic, a potent allergen; the staked heart causing serious blood loss; and sunlight (or its active component ultraviolet light) crisping vampires faster than you can say “deep-fried.” The religious aspects have been eliminated-- no crosses or holy water here, and the only priest we see is a vampire using the title for a nickname. The sexuality is lost as well-- no kinky subtext about vampirism as a substitute for oral sex a la Ann Rice (who tends, I think, to suck the metaphor dry). Blade is vampirism for the kind of geeks who attend Star Trek conventions-- less evocative than speculative, less atmospheric than kinetic and complex, a gaudy highspeed American anime about suckheads.
At least that was what the first Blade as directed by Stephen Norrington took to heart-- too much so, I thought. The picture had an overlit music-video look antithetical to illustrator Gene Colan’s trademark shadowy images (haven’t actually read the original comics, but have seen enough of Colan’s work to know that a single panel by the artist has more style than the entire first movie). The story was pretty much your standard comic-book apocalypse, with Blade the only force standing in the way of world takeover by the Vampire Nation.
To his credit, David Goyer (who wrote the first) seems to have taken the time and effort to step back and think of a more intriguing premise. “What,” he must have asked himself, “would be worse than a vampire, a creature that feeds on humans? A creature that feeds on vampires?” Enter the Reapers, mutated suckheads with a lust for both human and vampire blood, and the ability to propagate at an overwhelming rate. Blade finds himself in an uneasy truce with the Bloodpack-- a death squad originally formed to kill him, led by the beautiful Nyssa (Leonor Valera), daughter of Vampire Lord Damaskinos (Theodore Kertschmann). Together they hunt the Reapers, hoping to kill every one of them before they manage (in, it's estimated, a matter of days) to overrun the world.
Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro takes what was essentially a comic-book series about vampires and-- well doesn’t quite transcend it, but does bring a unique sensibility. Instead of the huge, antiseptic sets of the first pic he takes us down into dank sewers and moss-encrusted tunnels (the kind of he explored so effectively in Mimic); instead of a uniform lighting scheme he gives us a wide palette of colors, from the ghastly lime glow of an underground stairwell to the cool gray of a coming dawn. Del Toro is not quite as successful in his action sequences, which don’t have the lucidity of Tsui Hark’s or John Woo’s, but does manage not to get in the way of the excellent action choreography (by the intense Donnie Yen, of Iron Monkey and Once Upon a Time in China 2 fame, doubling here as a member of the Bloodpack).
But del Toro’s best moments aren’t action but the little details. When the vampires die they don’t dissipate (a cheat used on TV and video games, absolving the viewer from responsibility “it’s not flesh and blood anyway, who cares if it dies?”) they flare then fade like embers, leaving twisted little statues of soot (del Toro likes to obsess over textures-- wood, stone, human flesh). One vampire watches the sun rise for the first and last time, its skin peeling and floating away-- lovely effect-- before it crumbles to dust.
Sometimes del Toro’s imagery outpaces his powers of characterization-- he manages to light people in such interesting ways you don’t quite realize they’re not fully formed. Valera’s Nyssa is particularly interesting-- she nurses a growing attraction to Blade yet was taught that he was the enemy, the bogeyman used to frighten little vampires into behaving. We want to learn more, feel the hopelessness of her situation, yet we can’t; she remains a tantalizing enigma. Luke Goss as Nomak, leader of the Reapers, is an even bigger failure-- he’s the film’s putative villain, yet barely registers as a presence (it’s when del Toro presents the Reapers as an unstoppable force-- like his flood of mutant roaches in Mimic-- that we feel the threat). Both are given grandiloquent gestures to climax their story arc, and the gestures work-- we're moved-- but would have been even more moving if we got to know them better.
Wasn’t a problem del Toro suffered from in Cronos, his first and best work. There he focused less on the heaven of eternal life and more the hell of eternal death, equating the endless nightmare of being a vampire with the endless nightmare of being a dying old man-- all that pain and suffering stretching one’s remaining moments to an eternity. A potent metaphor, and the source of the film’s power; it was what Mimic badly needed with its stillborn narrative (which didn’t stop del Toro from giving us curtains of lovely white gauze veiling plague victims, or the abandoned subway platform lit like a haunted mansion). Problem's still apparent in Blade 2, though there’s enough momentum to take the film past its dead spots, and enough of del Toro’s fabulist imagery-- the ember death of vampires, the Reapers massing for an attack-- to linger on the palate, long after we’ve left the theater.
First published in Businessworld 4.5.02
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