SHINING BLADE RANKS MOVIE
Pacific Rim is a movie I like more in theory than in practice.
The far superior Hellboy II shows why it’s better to just let del Toro do his thing. The need for an audience surrogate gives us the milquetoast John Myers ( Rupert Evans), and the entire story is viewed through his eyes, so the movie feels like it’s wrestling with the weird stuff Hellboy brings to the table and the more “relatable” stuff with John that feels like a sop to nervous execs and wary audience members. The trade-off is that Hellboy isn’t really the star of his own movie. It’s impressive that del Toro didn’t have to fudge Hellboy’s origin or give him special powers to make him more relatable. It’s remarkable that the title character is being played by veteran character actor Ron Perlman (who absolutely nails Hellboy’s working-class attitude ). But back in 2004 when the film was released, it was a serious uphill battle and it’s easier to appreciate just how much del Toro was able to accomplish in trying to stay true to Mike Mignola’s comic. In the superhero-drenched marketplace of today, it’s easy to take a film like Hellboy for granted. That being said, Blade IIis also a movie I keep forgetting that’s part of his filmography, and I say that having written at length on the movie.
It’s a film that’s a lot of fun, and lets del Toro provide his spin on the vampire-action movie. It’s still a bit of an odd duck film, able to have fun with the action scenes and larger cast but never going as deep as it could, perhaps because of genre limitations or simply because there’s only time to do so much even if what the film is doing is repeatedly clearing out nests of reapers. It makes for an incredibly colorful feature that still deepens the vampire underworld by bringing in a larger threat, the Reapers, that del Toro still finds sympathy for. Del Toro basically gives the series a soft reboot and repurposes it to his interest, finding a way to make Blade ( Wesley Snipes) far more interesting by playing him off a variety of characters. I like this move far more than I expected, especially since I’m not a fan of the first Blade.
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