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The product of a hallucinatory arthouse sensibility fused with a penchant for blockbuster opulence and video-game-style relentlessness, Blade II earns its distinction as a guilty pleasure simply because it brims with enough style, glitz, and technique to break through the mold of mediocre summer showmanship. In a triumph of gratuitous production design, Spanish auteur Guillermo del Toro orchestrates the film's visuals with a gracefully excessive implementation of color -- corrosive yellows, sanguine reds and livid greens, which all lend Blade II the lacquered veneer of a Gothic expressionistic painting that only heightens this comic-book adaptation's gruesome energy. Though the martial-arts choreography is sometimes supplanted by smatterings of low-grade CGI, suggesting in the combat sequences a cross between Virtua Fighter and Mortal Kombat (and thereby totally dispelling the intensity of the battle), the sequel as a whole retains enough of the fluid grace of the original to keep viewers more or less captivated with its impeccable construction. |
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Blade II |
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capsule review by André de Alencar Lyon |
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Guillermo del Toro |
