Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Greg reviewed the 1998 Stephen Norrington film Blade. Today, Bernhardt looks at the 2002 Guillermo del Toro film, Blade II. This article will contain spoilers.
Ultraviolet. Blade (1998). Truly, Greg gets all the good assignments for this column.
I, on the other hand, am back in the saddle for Blade II (2002), directed by Guillermo del Toro and written by David S. Goyer. We’re post-The Matrix, post-Vampire: The Masquerade, and quickly moving post-larp in the vampire zeitgeist; Buffy and Angel are still on the air but fading, and the scene is going to get real sci-fi real fast, thanks in no small part to franchises like Underworld and TV shows like Ultraviolet (the British production that got serialized in a second run on US cable stations like the Sci-Fi Channel, not Greg’s white whale of a film). There’s even a Blade television show that gets an abbreviated first season in this decade. This movie, humble as it is now in memory and general impact — and absolutely one of Guillermo del Toro’s lesser works — plays a somewhat important part in the transition of the pop culture vampire from the larp-y nineties into the version that would move into prominence in the latter half of the 2000s, where the vampires were more and more outright protagonists and good guys. (Angel’s important for that too, along with a number of other projects, but Blade is probably the most recognizable ‘good guy vampire’ from the turn of the millennium; and make no mistake, Blade II is interested in him as a vampire, not a human with an affliction or “half-breed” Daywalker.)
The strongest thing here by far is the production design. Not the sets, or at least not the locations and set-conceptions — this movie is set in way too many explicit warehouses, converted warehouses and sewers — but the way costumes, props, and the set dressings look. They do their best with a parade of dingy brown industrial locations in an incredibly grimy Prague. It’s not just the big things either, like the stake guns or the light grenades. There’s cool little props that only appear once, like the blood reader in the vampire castle that controls access to the vampire king’s inner sanctum, styled after the tail of a scorpion. This is hardly a surprise given del Toro’s chops and the projects he had just finished and would go on to helm — Mimic, del Toro’s first big American break as a director, was nothing special except for the design and implementation of its monster; a few years after Blade II, Hellboy II: The Golden Army would be similarly gorgeous in design and production aesthetic but underwhelm everywhere else; and Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water speak for themselves, the former being probably his most enduring work even though the latter won him Best Picture.
I tried coming back to this movie a couple times over the years before watching it for this project, and one of the reasons I bounced off it so hard then was that I was so burnt out on raver goth and industrial scene black leather. Blade, of course, is the king of the look, once again sporting the black trenchcoat with stab vest underneath, but every other vampire in this movie also looks like they stepped out of a German sex club for much of their time on screen, and it could be a bit much. But movies don’t look like this anymore! And it’s much easier for me to enjoy the Uzi retrofitted into a chunky vampire-slaying pistol, the harsh electric blue light grenades, and all the custom weapons the doomed Dirty Dozen vampires bring to the table now than it was even in 2018.
This extends to the CGI in the movie, as well. I remember thinking it looked bad when it came out, and then horrific when I tried to rewatch it a few years ago. Now it’s simply of its time. Yeah, the vampire burning effects are very PlayStation 3. Yeah, every now and again Blade is completely replaced with a computer-animated stand-in, and it not only changes his polygon count but the speed and grace with which the character moves around the screen, because Wesley Snipes is very, very deliberate with his choreography in this picture. That’s fine; I’ve now played a lot of video games that approximate this look, and this still kind of does it better than some of them have managed. Once “I am looking at CGI instead of a real person” is no longer a red flag in your head, you can meet it perfectly well on its own terms.
The best intersection of these two very of-their-time components of the film is the design of the baddies in Blade II. We’ve talked before about the difference between draculas and nosferatus — two different approaches to depicting the bloodsucking corpse and its various metaphors. Well, after the first film was all about the sexy, rapacious, high society and high-falutin’ draculas, now the nosferatus are here: bald, slimy, ugly, insectoid and unthinking in their violence. Outside of their patient zero and leader Nomak (Luke Goss), they are mindless, consumptive appetite, and they are feeding off the draculas, which is why the vampires that Blade’s been hunting want to team up with him. The main gimmick for the nosferatus is that instead of biting you normal-style with their teeth, their jaws split and open like insects and they drive a feeding tentacle into your neck. It looks pretty cool; del Toro would return to the imagery for his television series The Strain some ten years later (a possible future feature for this column).
This is about where the good news stops. The cast is serviceable-to-good; Goss and leading lady Leonor Varela, who plays the vampire swordwoman-assassin-princess Nyssa, both see the biggest roles of their careers here (though Varela is maybe more memorable to this column’s audience as the first actress to play Marta, the put-upon on-again off-again girlfriend of Gob Bluth in Arrested Development). Ron Perlman is the leader of the vampire tactical team, playing the German “Reinhardt” and not even bothering to attempt an accent despite half the banter around his character clearly expecting him to have one; Kris Kristofferson is back as Whistler, and is a welcome return despite the script feeling it needs to spend the first 15 minutes of the film explaining how that’s possible given he shot himself in the head to stave off turning into a vampire in the first film (the answer is both tedious and unconvincing); Norman Reedus of recent Kojima Productions fame is Blade’s new youthful gadgets engineer Scud, woefully miscast as a “sick moves, daddio!” early aughts cool kid, constantly smoking what is clearly supposed to be a joint but is just a handrolled cigarette; his most irritating moment in the film is when Scud gets a FedEx box delivered to his vampire-hunting van on overwatch duty outside the nightclub and he opens it to pull out a box of Krispy Kreme donuts which he has presumably had shipped over from the Good Ol’ US of A, smiling and saying, “Mother’s milk.” Impressively, the joke neither works coming nor going, and making him incredibly annoying undercuts their half-hearted effort to make you think Whistler’s the mole instead of him. Most galling of all the casting decisions is prime Donnie Yen at the height of his powers playing Snowman, a silent member of the vampire tactical team who gets one cool sword fighting scene and then dies offscreen in the sewers. Snipes is nowhere near as checked out as he’ll become in the third installment of this franchise, but he’s not given much to work with, and he struggles with the choices the script does make about Blade.
That brings us to David S. Goyer, one of the more frustrating screenwriters in superhero and comic book genre fiction. A mediocre-to-bad comic book writer turned mediocre-to-bad screenwriter, he’s a veteran hand who knows precisely what the studio wants and delivers it to them in the most stridently 6/10 fashion possible. The only times that Goyer scripts get interesting are when he indulges his latent right-wing political anxieties and paranoias; he got really put into a tizzy by Occupy Wall Street, the imagery of which shows up as the work of a violent subversive far left military movement in both of his major 2012 script projects, Dark Knight Rises and Call of Duty: Black Ops II (yes, the video game). And yet! His scripts can certainly turn a phrase when they need to. Both Man of Steel (2013) and The Dark Knight (2008) are evidence of this, along with Dark City (1998) and, well, Blade (1998). Like it or not, he is the writing credit on both, “Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill” and, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
This is not one of the few scripts of his where he found some mojo. It’s not his fault that everything takes place in Prague, since that’s where the tax credits said they were gonna shoot, but the plot moves mechanically from point to overdetermined point with no art or grace; the draculas break into Blade’s Prague homebase to recruit him to kill the nosferatus, and after meeting the vampire king, who also lives in Prague, he immediately has an instinct about where the nosferatus are going to strike next — the local vampire sexmurder rave club — which they do. Once that set of fight scenes is done, then Blade gives a line of reasoning about why they’re going to be in the sewer, and also are going to attack the dracula kill team during the day, and that happens too. Then he gets whisked away to the end of the movie as the draculas reveal that they have been secretly manipulating him all along and there were no real stakes (ha) to any of this; they were just trying to steal his Daywalker blood (which they could have done at any point in the movie). This is because the nosferatus were a secret forced evolutionary project devised by the vampire king of the draculas. Surprise! But canny viewers already knew this, not only because of a scene between the king and his scheming vizier (a sinister EU environmental lawyer; there’s that Goyer touch) that clumsily gives it away at the start of the second act, but because the vampire king is the only dracula who looks like a nosferatu. It’s a surprise to everyone else, though, as is Scud turning out to have been evil since the beginning as the draculas’ man on the inside. But then Blade smiles. Because Blade also knew that? And pretended that he didn’t in order to set up a very contingent series of events that allows him to press a bomb detonator while in dracula custody to blow up Scud? That still leaves him captured and ready to be blood-drained by the draculas, which actually works and he’s only saved by Novak attacking the vampire castle? It’s a very stupid script. The vampire castle is pretty cool looking though! The only location that really manages it.
All of this is mostly forgivable in the sense that a bad Goyer script, whether in Batman or Call of Duty or Blade, is mainly just a scaffold to hang Cool Stuff set pieces and action scenes off of. Here we run into our second problem, however: Guillermo del Toro is good at many things; action direction is not one of them. The action in this movie is just kinda there, and there too much. Fights routinely go too long; Snipes leans even heavier into the extremely scripted, balletic action choreography to the point that you kind of expect him to reveal he’s got some form of vampire precognition to explain why he always looks like he’s doing violent dance moves at just under full speed but with the proper timing to never get hit, and the non-Novak nosferatus are way too goofy. They’re just huge goofballs. It’s pretty funny some of the time when they’re shambling around doing gorilla runs or someone turns on a light and they all lurch up to their feet like startled deer, but the overriding energy is “zombies making fun of Spider-man.” The CGI that’s employed when Blade and eventually Novak start bouncing around the room when fights get serious no longer bothers me from a craft perspective, but the choreography there isn’t any good either; it’s sort of like a mediocre riff on Advent Children. But none of it is like, gallingly bad. There’s some good ideas in there, especially when it comes to getting sunlight into the various environments. It’s just decidedly not great.
That’s what Blade II comes down to in the end: It’s not great, but it is very watchable. A lot of stuff looks cool. There are neat gadgets, neat weapons, and cool outfits. Kris Kristofferson gets to do his thing. Not for as many scenes as you’d like! And way too many of them involve Norman Reedus! But he gets to do his thing. You have to deal with Blade telling a vampire the reason he hunts their kind is, “Fate, I suppose” instead of, “You feed on human beings and I do not like that,” as part of her becoming his love interest, but that’s fine too because the film also kind of forgets about it and then ties it all off by killing her in the last scene before having to actually deal with characters talking deeply about emotions. I will have no objection to watching it again in another 23 years, given the opportunity.
Next week, a movie which I probably will not say that about: Blade Trinity.
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