Guillermo del Toro brings a carefully crafted style to Blade 2 that elev

Guillermo del Toro brings a carefully crafted style to Blade 2 that elevates it beyond most other films of its kind.

Grade: B-
"You... do not know... who you... are *beep* with!"
The original Blade was a barely coherent mixture of sub-standard special effects, monotonous fight scenes and uninspired superhero posturing, the approximate equivalent of watching someone else play a bloody video game. Blade II follows some four years later, and behold: it's an unexpectedly ambitious vampire movie, armed with a bigger budget, a better script, a truly epic plot and a director with artistic sensibilities of his own. I think it betrays itself with an unnecessarily extended climax, but that's open to debate; in any event, I was grateful that the sequel had a sense of fun as well as gore.
The movie, imposing at over two hours, begins with a primer on the franchise mythology (the movies are based on a comic book series): Blade (Wesley Snipes) is a half-vampire, half-human, a creature with the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither. His buddy Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) was captured by the vamps in the first movie, and a major plotline of this one is retrieving him from their grip.
But while the original would have contented itself with that flimsy skeleton of a plot, Blade II sets its sights farther. You see, there is a new breed of vampire running loose, a superpowerful race known as the Reapers, whose instinct to feed is insatiable. That, combined with the fact that everyone they bite becomes one of them (much like the regular vampires), spells trouble for both the humans and the vampires. Blade must join forces with his previous arch nemeses and rid the world of this new threat before the Reapers can completely take over.
This is one of the most constantly violent, gruesome mainstream movies I have ever seen, and yet neither the violence nor the gore is intended to repulse. Director Guillermo Del Toro, following up the far more subdued The Devil's Backbone, knows how to put chaos on the screen and have it make sense to the viewer; his twirling cameras and frequent, often noticeable use of digital effects somehow keep the action fluid.
The story, solid by any standard, has suprisingly grandiose, nearly Shakespearean elements to it; a late scene has one of the central characters running across the screen, busting down doors, screaming "FATHER!" It gets increasingly apocalyptic as it moves along, until we feel that the fate of the world truly does rest in the hands of this vampire slayer (who, by the way, is way cooler than Buffy, though not as attractive).
Again, I do feel that the movie overreaches in the last of its series of climaxes with a "main event" battle that should not take place. I don't want to give away the plot, but the hero fights the villain to the death after the villain has, to a large extent, been devillainized; we feel far too much sympathy for the "bad guy" to be satisfied with the way things inevitably turn out. It sounds like I'm nitpicking, but it's really a major problem: there shouldn't be any ambivalence about rooting for the superhero in a superhero movie.
However, Blade II follows up the unsatisfying climax with an image that's both funny and appropriate. The scene, and indeed the entire movie, reveal a mildly promising future for a franchise that limped out of the starting gate.