After his daunting Cronos, and fresh off the heals of The Devil’s Backbone, Guillermo del Toro presents the follow-up to Stephen Norrington’s Blade. However, the Mexican filmmaker’s ever-present style leaves a lot to be desired in what one can only hope is a potboiler for the otherwise consummate director.

When the vampire populace is threatened by Reapers–the manifestation of a mutation of the vampire gene/disease wherein vampires feed upon their own kind–the head of the vampire underworld, the Shadow Council, enlists Blade (Wesley Snipes) to lead a tactical unit of vampire elite, the Bloodpack, in hopes of eradicating the menace.

The seldom seen scenario of a renowned director accepting the chore of following in someone’s footsteps always creates as much apprehension as it does intrigue. In Del Toro’s case, the ante is upped in that the work in which he is shadowboxing is a notoriously subpar performance. The mere thought of Del Toro fashioning something out of nothing, thereby making the irrelevant relevant, is as alluring as the thought of watching the filmmaker fail miserably. Regardless of the outcome, like an automobile wreck, we cannot take our eyes away.

In what would appear to be a stunning upset of franchise formula, Blade II quickly opens with the typical plotline for the tertiary installment in a trilogy: The forces of good and evil joining one another’s ranks in order to defeat a more powerful, common enemy, thus eschewing the traditional storyline in a sequel involving numerous foes, all of which are more menacing than the singular nemesis in Part One. But, like most of the film, the audience is let down as Del Toro lapses back into the mold which he’d hereto spent his career breaking (while never bothering to follow proper sequel protocol). After a plot twist is revealed in which reading too much into the film’s political undertones renders a ruse where faux evil is created by an authority in which to distract the opposition (cf. 911Truth), the filmmaker further disappoints by issuing a halfhearted uber-antagonist hybrid of Nosferatu and John McTiernan’s Predator, upgraded for the sequel by being impervious to garlic and silver (replete with vagina dementia from Hell), before didactically aligning and confirming the Christ figure in his forerunner’s effort by vocalizing that Blade was taken in twenty years prior at the tender age of thirteen (20 + 13 = 33). To make matters worse, Blade gains said trademark stigmata during the course of the film. After this, everything else is sadly downhill.

Perplexingly, Del Toro indeed mimics his predecessor, yet in all the wrong places. He does nothing of consequence with his narrative as he seems content to merely produce a rote outing bearing the sole agenda of action without issuing his audience the slightest smidgeon of respect via challenge or entertainment. For example, being a self-confessed sequel, the work blatantly ignores the figure of Karen Jensen in the original, whom we expect to reappear along with her heroic counterpart but, alas, she is head-scratchingly absent as, gratuitously, Blade’s sidekick, Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), is brought back as only a poor horror sequel would have it. The latter character’s reemergence serves no purpose outside of audience recognition while such flippantly highlights the director’s moot dismissal of audience expectation and plot continuity with the removal of the former.

Much like the non sequitur of an singular antagonist that is almost impossible to kill succeeded by multiple, more powerful villains, now cast as an equal match to the established protagonist in the sequel, Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II offers nothing of consequence. What’s worse from the famed, gifted director is that the only thing notably recognizable about the feature is the filmmaker’s signature imagery, all of which is wasted in yet another routine follow-up to standard horror fare.

-Egregious Gurnow