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Genre movies are often fascinating for the specialized technical aspects that step to the fore ahead of writing, acting, and directing. The special effects that drive the “Star Wars” saga is one example, as is the sweeping cinematography in Ridley Scott’s atmospheric sci-fi films. However, I never thought I’d see a film in which this particular aspect of filmmaking was the technical highpoint: “Blade II” is a foley artist’s dream. There isn’t one scene in the movie in which characters don’t inhabit a space filled with a variety of hard surfaces perfect for creating bone-crunching thuds, and each character features a unique sound library of snaps, crackles and pops, most amusingly in the case of Blade himself, who enjoys getting the kinks out of his neck and fingers before dispatching a bloodsucker. In the old days of action films, the coup de grace of any fight, the moment we know the hero has finally defeated his nemesis, is the sick sound of the latter’s arm, leg, or neck snapping like a twig. In “Blade II”, though, bones are audibly broken with such breezy nonchalance you no longer register the fact that after a certain point neither fighter could really continue the battle (the head Reaper has his arm bent completely backwards and a second later punches with it as though nothing had happened). Certainly the foley artists were hard-pressed for new and increasingly devastating noises to accompany the fighting: one wonders how many carrots, celery stalks, and bags of crushed ice these dedicated and oft overlooked aural engineers went through to get the job done right.
Essentially a two-hour hybrid of a kung-fu movie and a professional wrestling cage match, the film does its level best to push the envelope of cinematic hand-to-hand combat, a trend started by “The Matrix” a few years back. The director, Guillermo del Toro, succeeds in a sense because the fights in “Blade II” are highly imaginative in the dizzying variety of moves, styles of fighting, use of traditional and modern weaponry, and sheer fun. Where the movie falls short is the CGI shots and the editing. In “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, Ang Lee highlighted the graceful, balletic quality of the fighting by, first of all, using real actors (in most of the shots) attached to wires, leaping off of springboards, etc., and, second, minimizing the cuts, allowing the audience to appreciate the skill and dexterity of the actors in longer takes. “Blade II” commits the double sin of using CGI too much, creating a disappointingly cartoon-like feel, and slashing the film to pieces almost willy-nilly, which means the audience has no frame of reference for most of the sequences. A fight scene in “Blade II” consists of the squaring-off of combatants, an exchange of sarcastic taunts, and then a few minutes of rapidfire cutting that reduces the action to an often bewildering flash of static images. Fists, blades, boots, bared fangs, yes, but what about the people doing the fighting? It’s true of all films, but even in genre action pieces like “Blade II” the filmmakers need to remember that human craftsmanship— in this case, real choreography rather than post-production sound and fury— is never outdated.
Fortunately, as mentioned, “Blade II” is fairly imaginative in its freewheeling fight sequences. Every scene has a satisfying look and feel. Blade fights in a spectacular menagerie of locations: in front of “Chorus Line” spotlights, on rickety scaffolding, in murky sewer tunnels, rising out of a bloodbath, and so on. No two vampires die the same way, and the film is almost witty in its destruction of its baddies. Some are sliced in two, others disintegrated by sunlight grenades, still others mowed down by silver bullets. Indeed, what makes the ‘Blade’ movies quite a bit of fun is their obvious intent to raise the stakes on a moribund genre. There’s nowhere else vampire movies can go, really, except bigger, faster, louder, and bloodier; “Blade II” is all those things and then some. The film borrows liberally not only from good old-fashioned vampire mythology, but also sci-fi/action staples like “Predator”, “Alien”, “Aliens”, “Batman”, and even “Twelve Monkeys”. There are plenty of wry jokes, too, such as the head vampire dining on blood that looks like a Jello mold, or another vampire snorting crystallized blood drops, cocaine style. The other thing you can do with the vampire genre is to take the whole thing a little too seriously, as we’ve seen in the overwrought gothic romances of Anne Rice, and the movie pokes fun at this new breed of vampire cultishness with the introduction of a snotty ruling class that reigns supreme over something called “the vampire nation”. The “House of Pain” sequence, in which the aristocratic vampires reluctantly mingle with the hoi polloi at an undead disco, practically plugging their noses, is a humorous and subtle dig at Rice-like pretentiousness.
Such humor is precisely what is so often lacking in good genre movies. Yes, “Blade II” is devoid of almost all of the qualities we normally associate with careful, thoughtful storytelling, but that’s a given— Blade is a comic book hero, after all. What genre action films must do is give us a vulnerable but ultimately indestructible hero, create a story that is necessarily thin but fits together cleanly and satisfyingly, and spare no expense in making the film look good. The most important ingredient, and the hardest to integrate into the story, is the humor. Exactly the right combination of self-deprecating humor and serious action is needed to create a really good action film. Too much and it becomes pointless burlesque; too little and it’s Sylvester Stallone. “Blade II” is a quality action film because it takes itself seriously enough to create a few thrills, but knows when and where to puncture its own self-importance. Immediately after the perfectly-cast Wesley Snipes uses his samurai sword to bifurcate Ron Perlman in the fait accompli showdown, Kris Kristoffersen tosses him his signature sunglasses, which he puts on as if coronating himself the king of badasses. A joke like that can rescue a film from drowning in its own inane violence, and there are just enough of those jokes in “Blade II”, and perfectly placed. Del Toro pulls off a virtuoso balancing act in that regard.
The most interesting thing about action and sci-fi action films is what they reveal to us about what our culture dreads the most. In the 80s there were numerous films, most chillingly the “Mad Max” series, in which nuclear holocaust (or something very like it) was our fate. Hardly surprising, as nuclear bombs were much on people’s minds in those days. What was interesting about the “Mad Max” movies was that the behavior of the people in those films, mostly despicable and subhuman, was easily recognizable as behavior that marked contemporary society. Exaggerated as it is, “Mad Max” has an apocalyptic quality that is expressed as the collapse of Western civilization at the hands of warmongers, the ruins left to the aimless punk rock generation. The films drew inspiration from the fringes of popular culture, as if these fringes pointed to our collective future.
Similarly, “Blade II”, like its original, finds its aesthetic in the shadowy urban dance culture, and it, too, has a prophetic warning of species annihilation: the human race has used itself up in the quest for pleasure to the extent that only the most extreme manner of existence is left; the only way forward is extinction. There is a feeling in “Blade II” that humanity is victimizing itself in an artificial and self-destructive evolutionary leap, the harbingers of which are the zombie-like youths shuffling to trance music like so many anemones waving listlessly on a sunless seafloor. The wasted vampires (the ignorant masses, enslaved by their decadence) along with the scheming vampire nobility (the ruling class, superseded and Machiavellian) will unwittingly conspire, each in their own manner, to bring about the destruction of everyone. The film likens the masses’ thirst for blood to a drug addiction, while the rulers’ Faustian masterplan involves corrupting DNA to create clones. As for superheroes, never mind them dealing with the threat of alien invaders or mutated arch-criminals. They’re around to protect us from ourselves. With its leather fetish, tattoos, scheming scientists, mindless kids, and S & M paraphernalia, arrayed together in ominous, unyielding darkness, “Blade II” neatly encapsulates the fear lurking in the popular subconscious these days: the doom facing a morally exhausted civilization slowly being consumed by its own appetites. |
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