Terminator. Alien. Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Star Wars: A New Hope. What thing do these films share in common? They are movies whose sequels are FAR superior to the original film. Well folks tonight, we can add another movie to that list. Which film do I speak of? Why "Blade" of course.
This evening I saw Blade II. This movie is the perfect start to a summer movie season that promises to be one of the best in years. Now, I loved the original Blade, you guys can attest to that. (We must have watched that movie like ten times the week it came out on DVD.) While I loved it, there were problems with it. They were unable to top the opening action scene in the night club, which really hurt the film. Plus, there was lots of down time that really fucked with the pacing. Despite these problems, the first movie was awesome. I felt there was no way that a sequel could ever top it, and if it even tried to it would just turn out to suffer from a bad case of Matrix Envy (Superfluous Bullet-time effects, Bad Wire-Fu).
Damn was I wrong. This movie was a fantastic popcorn action flick! Creepy, atmospheric... without being all fruity and goth. The plot was a little thin, but the action was incredible. And it's not just martial arts action, like the first one. There are elements of military combat, street-fighting... all kinds of stuff. The new type of vampires were pretty neat too, they've managed to make vampires scary again, and not the lace wearing pole-smokers Anne Rice has turned them into. And the effects didn't suck. There was only one really shittily done effects scene, which surprised me since every thing dealing with effects in the first one was obviously CGI.
All in all a fantastic film. RUN TO THE THEATER TO SEE IT!!! THIS I COMMAND!!!