Grade: C

The initial 1998 installment of “Blade,” based on a comic book about a half-human, half-vampire martial arts expert who tracks down and kills full blood-suckers, was fun junk, marked by ripe performances from Wesley Snipes as the title hero and Stephen Dorff as his main nemesis, and by a garish design that pulled out all the stops and held one’s often-amazed interest. The sequel has been fashioned by a more skilled filmmaker that the director of that effort, Stephen Norrington; the helmer of the new film is Guillermo Del Toro, whose “Cronos” (1992) and “The Devil’s Backbone” (2001) were remarkably stylish and whose “Mimic” (1997) was a successfully creepy move into the mainstream. Still, “Blade II” isn’t as sharp as the original. That’s not Del Toro’s fault: he’s made a visually inventive piece, and staged the periodic fight sequences with panache (although the points at which real people are replaced by computer-generated replicants are–as usual–all too obvious). Unfortunately, while the plot tries to give the material a new spin by having Blade join forces with his usual foes to fight a new vampiric strain that threatens both species, the narrative trajectory is all too reminiscent of the first picture, and the characters invented as threats to the hero just don’t measure to Dorff’s outrageous creation. Del Toro’s methodical pursuit of dark, gloomy atmosphere, moreover, while impressive in itself, has its own drawbacks: he’s so intent on showing us the moody settings and shadowy recesses that he doesn’t move things along speedily enough. Like its predecessor, “Blade II” seems overlong by a half-hour or so; or to put it in the genre’s own terms, the rising of the sun is postponed longer than the ideas in the script warrant.

In this installment fashioned by David S. Goyer (who wrote the script for the original film as well), the taciturn Blade first rescues his mentor Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), who seemed to have been killed last time around, from a vampire-controlled stasis chamber with the aid of his new assistant Scud (Norman Reedus). After the hard-bitten Whistler is restored to full human status, Blade is approached by the vampire king Damaskinos (Thomas Kretschmann) to enlist his aid in tracking down a mutant called Nomak (Luke Goss), who’s spawning a race of “Reapers” who feed on vampires as well as humans. Blade agrees, though not without some suspicions; and eventually he’s leading a band of vampire commandos–the lovely Nyssa (Leonor Varela) and her stalwart partner Asad (Danny John Jules), along with the “Bloodpack” of Chupa (Matt Schultze), Priest (Tony Curran), Snowman (Donnie Yen), Lighthammer (Daz Crawford) and Verlaine (Marit Velle Kile) led by brooding, nasty Reinhardt (Ron Perlman)–through dance clubs and sewers to track Nomak and his minions down and do away with them. Of course, there are twists in the pursuit, and the motives of some participants turn out to be quite different from what they’d alleged. Inevitably Blade winds up seriously imperilled and, as in the first flick, must be freed before taking on his ultimate foes. It would be nice to say the plot turns were imaginative and exciting, but they’re actually pretty predictable and tame; a final confrontation resembling nothing more than a WWF Smackdown championship match is especially tiresome. And apart from Kristofferson’s Whistler, who’s the typical cantankerous old coot, the secondary figures are pallidly drawn and played. Varela proves a colorless love interest, Perlman has gone to the tough-guy well once too often, and Reedus resembles a bargain-basement version of Joachin Phoenix as the scruffy Scud. Even more troublesome, the two vampire chieftains are dull creations. As Nomak, Goss barely registers but for his athletic abilities, and as the dark Damaskinos, Kretschmann looks rather like the wicked emperor from “Return of the Jedi” with black hood removed from a balding pate.

On the other hand, some of the fights are nicely staged, especially in the first half, and there are some nifty effects. The vampires expire splendidly: first they explode like sparklers, and then their exposed skeletons disintegrate. And there’s an especially cool moment when we see a severed head, which itself has been sliced in two, boasting an eye prominently blinking in one of the halves.

But as stylish as Del Toro’s take on this material is, and despite its occasionally amusing moments, “Blade II” seems in desperate need of more imagination than Goyer has been able to provide–as well as of somebody with the grotesque energy that Dorff contributed to the first film (as so many comic-book movies have shown, you really need a good villain in stuff like this). So despite some visual virtues, “Blade II” just doesn’t cut it.