I agree, Speed_2.
Blade II is fun as an action/martial arts movie, but it lacks the believability and realism/grittiness of the original. I think the first Blade is the movie that kicked off the comic book movie renaissance we have right now.
The direction of Blade was superb. The washed-out look of daylight, the mood-setting sped-up sequences of vampire horror on the streets at night... tight, reigned-in action that got big when it needed to be... great dialogue, great acting, and the sense that all this stuff really could be happening beneath our noses, in the real world.
Blade II lost any sense of realism. Everything was too over-the-top. Deacon Frost, in the first movie, had a secret vampire rave in a slaughterhouse - and all the other vampires said what he was doing was too risky, calling too much attention to their kind (and inviting threats like Blade), Then, in the second movie, they up that by 10,000x and have a giant club called 'The House of Pain' where vampires cut each other up. Yeeah. Everything else was exaggerated, too, like Blade's weapons. The UV spotlight in the first Blade was realistic enough, but we have to Take It To The Next Level! in Blade II by substituting it with these ridiculous UV grenades that somehow send UV light down sewer tunnels and around corners, etc. Then there were some scenes that just didn't make sense - like the decoy bomb thing that was stuck to Ron Perlman's head. It's a decoy, wait, it's not a decoy, you know what I mean. Blade pretends like it really is a decoy, and Perlman tears it off and tosses it to Scud, who gives his AHAHA IM EVIL speech, then Blade fesses up that he knew he was all along, and reveals that it's NOT a decoy, and blows Scud up. If it wasn't a decoy, why didn't he just blow up Perlman to begin with (the greater threat) and take out Scud with a well-aimed vampire punch (or his trusty old garotte wire hidden in the belt from the last movie...)? The reason, of course, is so we could have that 'cool' double-double-cross scene, but it made no literary sense.
Oh, and when Blade reveals that it's not really a decoy, Scud just stands there holding the bomb in his hand, looking at it, and going 'oh sh!t..' instead of throwing it away... argh.
The acting and dialogue were pretty awful in Blade II as well. Aside from Ron Perlman and Kristofferson (whose character should be dead anyway), all the secondary characters were just terrible. Like Scud - 'Yo blade, check it out'; Nyessa's stilted, emotionless drone; that awful, awful actor that played the slimy lawyer... etc. Donnie Yen was awesome, but his wasn't a speaking role, naturally.
I've noticed this about del Toro's films - the delivery of lines is often pretty bad. I suspect it's due to the fact that he's not a native English speaker, and his ear can't tell when someone's speaking a line well or not. I think he'd do a lot more retakes of speaking scenes otherwise.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this film for the most part, but in my mind, it's a fun B movie, not a cinematic masterpiece. I felt the same way about Hellboy I and II and Pan's Labyrinth as well.
The first Blade is far better than them all.
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