20 Years Later: Blade II

Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Starring: Wesley Snipes, Ron Perlman, Norman Reedus
Running time: 117 minutes

Remember how Black Panther was praised for being the first Marvel superhero film with a Black protagonist? And also how people were excited for Deadpool and Logan being R-rated?. But sometimes it looks like we may have a very short memory. This explains a lot, to be honest ─ because 24 years ago, back in 1998, Wesley Snipes became Blade, the human-hybrid vampire-hunter in Stephen Norrington’s superhero horror film adapted from the Marvel comics, making him the first Black superhero in a major studio R-rated film.

Blade was dark, violent, fun and stylish –  everything we could expect from a good comic book adaptation (unless you're only 13). The success of the film proved that Marvel adaptations could be successful, and Blade is often seen as the film that set the stage for further adaptations and eventually the development of the beloved MCU...for better or worse. The point is that Blade was successful and thus a sequel (don’t ever talk to me about the other sequel) was green-lit, and that’s when things got really interesting. Norrington declined the offer, and Guillermo del freaking Toro was hired to direct Blade II.

Of course, the director is really open about the fact that, at first, he did not wish to work on Blade II, and that, for the most part, the film was done only to make Hellboy possible. At the time, del Toro wasn’t the legend we know today – he had only directed Cronos, a slow paced and very unusual low-budget vampire story, and Mimic, a sci-fi horror studio film which did not do very well at the box office. For convincing producers to do a project like Hellboy, that wouldn’t be enough. Del Toro needed to show he could direct an action blockbuster.

The Mexican maestro, however, is anything but a yes-man and because of his inability to do a film he does not want to do, he had to find a way to make Blade II, a pure studio film, into something more personal. Something with monsters he could love. That’s why he brought the Reapers, a new, evolved, breed of vampires ─ introduced in the film as a new variant of the vampire virus ─ led by Jared Nomak (Luke Goss, one of the the twins from Eighties band Bros, for those who have the same thirst for weird and useless trivia as I have) which are a threat to both vampires and humans. 

Reapers are Vampires 2.0 – they do not fear silver nor garlic, their only weakness is sunlight and they preferably feed on vampire blood. The idea was also for del Toro to make vampires more violent, more primitive, closer to the original myths of the strigois ─ which he would later explore in The Strain ─ and away from the Victorian romantic ones who keep philosophising on their conditions that we are so used to in popular culture since Dracula. Del Toro wanted to make vampires scary again, and the reapers are clearly not sparkling like diamonds in the sunlight while hitting on young college girls –  if you know what I mean.

They are so scary that, to fight them, vampire overlord Eli Damaskinos (Thomas Kretschmann) calls a truce with Blade and asks for his help, arguing that the Reapers are a common enemy. Blade thus reluctantly teams up with the Bloodpack, a group of vampire fighters originally trained to fight him. And...that’s it. From there, Blade II is an action blockbuster with enhanced vampires hunting vampires and Blade slashing both of them with style for our enjoyment.

That’s the thing with del Toro – whether you like it or not, he always faithfully delivers the genre promised by the premise of the film. If he’s doing a film about robots fighting giant monsters, he gives you that, and if he’s doing a gothic romance, once again, that’s what you get. Del Toro's genuine respect – and love – for genre is what makes him probably my favourite director/writer in cinema at the moment (with maybe Edgar Wright for the same reasons). At a time when there is so much so-called genre film which displays a blatant disdain for the genre they belong to – the so-called “elevated horror” being one example – having an auteur like del Toro is refreshing and salutary.

This is not to say that there are no themes in Blade II. There is an underlying discourse on addiction, but the film also explores the question of paternity and filiation, a recurring theme in del Toro’s filmography. These give a bit more weight to the film, but they take a backseat and, to be honest, who cares? We’re here for the monsters and the cool fights! And the film delivers. Blade II is violent, colourful and fast-paced, but also generous and blessed with a beautiful art direction, another trademark of its director. Some scenes, like the autopsy of a Reaper or Damaskinos lasciviously stepping in a pool of blood dressed with a cape, are still iconic twenty years later.

Re-watching Blade II for this review made me afraid to realise that the film I liked twenty years ago had aged badly, and that all that was left was nostalgia enhanced by my fondness of del Toro’s work. But that never felt like the case. Even the CGI, thanks to the smart use of light and motion blur is still...pretty good, I guess. In any case, Blade II is still highly enjoyable and entertaining in 2022, and what superhero films should be. It never tries to be something else and it is never ashamed of what it is. And that’s why, twenty years later, Blade II is still one of the best films in a genre (alongside Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man) that has since become so important in the cinema landscape and yet so formatted.

Did you know? Morbius – an adversary of both Blade and Spider-Man in the comics – was initially considered to appear in the film, before Marvel decided to use the character for “a separate franchise,” according to screenwriter David S. Goyer. A Morbius film set in Sony’s Venom universe is set to release this April.