lade and Blade 2 are strangely-orphaned movies. No one seems to include them in their list of best comic book movies, or even successful comic book movies. Yet they both made money, were both more or less watchable, and Blade 3 is coming out December 2004, so clearly the franchise is profiting. But at the same time, no one ever seems to talk about them. For movies that spend so much time trying to make the hero seem cool, it's sort of sad how little anyone really seems to care about them.

I'm not sure why, but it's probably got something to do with the way Blade 1 and 2 both felt like an especially gory episode of some TV series you've never seen before, but somehow stumbled across and ended up watching 2 hours of. They just don't really feel like movies, especially not big budget Hollywood movies. They look pretty good, and they have some decent fight scenes and good special effects, but everyone in them always just feels sort of low budget, for no particular reason.

I've seen both movies, and they're not bad, but eh... They aren't good enough to really dislike, they just sort of are. They try for pathos and misery and emotion, but the bad guys are instantly-forgettable, and Wesley Snipes as Blade is simply incapable of including any emotion in his acting. He's tolerable at the martial arts, but the rest of the time he's like the Black Neo; emotionless and existing solely for the requirements of the plot.  Blade simply exists, and he spends his time killing vampires, while never making any real difference in their worldwide numbers of power.  Rinse and repeat.

Blade 2
Script/Story: 5
Acting/Casting: 3
Humor: 4
Action: 6
Horror: 3
Eye Candy: 6
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 4
Overall: 4.5

January 31, 2003

I finally got around to watching Blade II Friday evening.  I say finally since I meant to see it in the theaters, and meant to get the DVD, but never did so. We just bought it Friday.  Bought it twice.

This differs from various other films that I will at some point get around to watching, that I've owned for weeks or months, and just never gotten around to watching. (We've had Bowling for Columbine here for at least two months without ever watching it, and I required similar amounts of time between purchase and viewing for Tomb Raider I, Seven, and Red Dragon, to name a few.)

Malaya had seen Blade II in the theaters, and remembered it sucking and being pretty boring, but couldn't quite remember why. I only saw Blade on tape here, an old copy of a copy that she got from a friend, and it had no sound.  Not that that changed the viewing experience much.

I'd give my review of Blade II, but I don't really care that much.  If you want to read a review from someone who did care, go check out Harry the Knowles' painfully unreadable and entirely obscene review.

It wasn't bad, at least not unwatchably bad.  It just was never exciting in any way.  The outcome seemed preordained, and there aren't any characters we're given to care about.  Having seen the rather mediocre Underworld a few months ago (an experience that I blogged about at astonishing length), it was hard not to compare the two films, with their similar "vampires battle super strong monster type creatures who want to bite them" plots.  In fact, thinking about it now, there's really no difference whatsoever between the reapers in Blade II and the Lycans in Underworld.  Both are monstrous, savage, attacking things that leap around with superhuman speed (unless of course it would enable them to kill one of the good guys, in which case they become slow and feeble) and kill by ripping you in half or biting large hunks out of your neck, after which you turn into one of them, assuming you don't die first.

Anyway, Blade 2 wasn't bad, and it had great art design and sets and special effects (even though most of the action was stupid, it was well done stupid) and character design.  There's just no real plot or characterization.  Blade, as rendered by Wesley Snipes is like basically every Wesley Snipes character; emotionless. He just is; there's never any sense of fear or doubt or grief or love or anything like that.  He just goes around killing vampires with all the passion of a man taking out the trash. Which could be a character trait in of itself; like he's been killing them for so long he no longer cares, but it's not played that way.  He just runs and leaps and shoots and the vampires try to fight back but they're too stupid to use appropriate weapons so they're pretty much just cannon fodder for Blade with his magical silver or garlic or whatever bullets.  The liquid silver/photosynthesis things in Underworld were cooler, honestly, and their throwing weapons weren't as silly and cheesy either.

I guess Blade the character is supposed to be cool; he's all in black with cool armor and weapons and sunglasses (which never get knocked off even when he's hit hard enough to knock him in spinning circles across a long room) and he's a half vampire and he kills vampires, etc.  But I see him as an early form of the boring, computerized Neo of Matrix 2 and 3.  He's often a computer effect in the fights, which doesn't work very well, but more on that later.  But it's more his dispassionate nature and the fact that you never doubt that he'll win in the end that keeps you from caring.  At least it kept me from caring in Blade II, so I was watching the nice sets and potentially interesting world and periodic overlong fight scenes, and yawning and wondering when it would end.

There's no real plot, it's just sort of Blade does this and then Blade does that and the bad guys are weird and bad but you know they'll die in messy fashion and you don't really care one way or another.  And it's not because the acting and actors are so mediocre and pointless, like they were in Underworld.  There's just no plot in Blade 2 to pull you along.

As for the action, it's often okay, but it also reminded me of the rubber-looking fake Neo stuff in Matrix 2 and 3, and of course the boring web swinging intervals in Spider-Man, and the Hulk, judging by what people unfortunate enough to have seen that movie said about it.  When you're so obviously watching computer animation fight, it's just like watching a video game. And as most everyone knows, that's damn boring, if you're not running the controls yourself.

Lots of the fights had real stuff going on, Wesley Snipes and some stunt doubles pretending to fight, and then the camera would move back so that they were in front of a bank of lights or shown from a distance, at which point their moves would become 10x more acrobatic and faster, which made it quite obvious that we'd switched to computer graphics. They threw in a bunch of that sort of thing mid-fight with real people as well, where Blade would suddenly fly or leap 30 feet into the air and come down with a huge crash, at which point it would cut back to Wesley (or another character) kneeling there dramatically. And it was integrated pretty seamlessly, but it never passed the gut check, so you're always aware that it's a special effect, and it feels animated and non-visceral.

I'm rambling.  I guess my main objection is that there aren't any interesting characters, interacting in interest fashion. There are a lot of characters that could be interesting, in another movie or with a different plot, but in this film they're all just gun or silver stake or sword or reaper jaw fodder, sooner or later. Usually sooner.  It's like a series of relatively good-looking segments, combined into 110 minutes of uncompelling plot.

And for some people, that's probably plenty.  I know that I used to enjoy that sort of thing well enough, or at least I thought I did, but my movie requirements seem to have grown, while the quality of action movies I'm watching have stayed the same.

I started on this only since I wanted to relate my semi-amusing tale of buying Blade 2 twice in the same day.  And then forgot to mention that.

Briefly, we were walking around the strip mall while our clothing was going at the Laundromat, and went into Blockbuster to check out the discount used DVDs.  They had Finding Nemo for $13, so we got a copy of that, (which we'll probably get around to watching by oh... June) and while skimming we passed through the used VHS section, and couldn't help but notice the 20 or so copies of Blade 2.  They were going for $5 a pop, and for $2.50 each it seemed worth it to us, me to see it for the first time and satisfy my curiosity, Malaya to see it again and remember how lame it was.

I picked a tape out of the middle of a row, and we took it home.  I had no real intention of watching it any time soon, but around 8:30 we were on the couch with Dusty occupying his usual spot in my lap (defined as everything from the hips to below the knees, when my feet are up on the ottoman and he's sprawled out) and we had nothing else taped off of TV to watch, and Malaya wanted to throw in Blade II.

She put it in and it started up... and there was no sound.  Picture, crystal clear, even if we were stuck with a crappy pan and scan version, but no sound at all.  Fiddling with the controls commenced, and we tried it through the stereo rather than TV, but there was no fixing it.

I figured we'd take it back tomorrow, but she pointed out that since it wasn't even 9pm yet, we could just return it.  Or more to the point, I could return it, since I was closer to dressed for going out in public, and she was feeling lazier.  So I threw on my leather jacket and drove over to Blockbuster and got another copy.  But I figured we might as well upgrade, and they had one copy of Blade 2 on DVD, so I got that instead.  After the exchange value I owed them $5.41 for it, since the DVD was $9.99, which seemed pretty cheap for a DVD in proper letter box format and with perfect sound and picture quality.

I suppose I'm glad that we got it in DVD, and paid another $5 to do so, even though I can't actually imagine watching that mediocre film again.  It's like a DVD feels like an investment, while a movie on tape is so 80's.

And it's just that sort of sentiment that's making Hollywood ever more profitable, mostly due to them making more on DVD sales than movie box office profits.  And if you're smart, you'll always remember that Hollywood fought tooth and nail to keep movies from being sold on VCRs since they said no one would go to theaters anymore if they could just watch them at home. And they didn't want VCRs to record movies since they said it would turn into piracy that would kill off the industry.  And they fought against laser disks since the image quality was too good and it would kill off the industry.  And they fought against cheap DVD sales, since that would kill off the industry.

Just something to keep in mind when they start whining and bitching about whatever their latest misguided industry mission is.

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