Every Guillermo Del Toro Movie - Ranked Worst To Best

Blade II is a comic book movie where a half-vampire drops a villain with a suplex.

Vampire. Suplex.

Guillermo del Toro was not involved in the first Blade film, a commercial hit in the late 90's. Wesley Snipes, before being the butt of late night talk show jokes and having his film career derailed for minor white collar crimes, was the embodiment of cool, building upon his fame from earlier in the decade. Snipes' portrayal of the troubled but badass daywalker subtly touched on racial prejudices and Oedipal complexes while still just being a great time at the movies with a good amount of fang-related gore.

Del Toro jumped into the director's seat for the sequel, which maintains the same amount of fun as the first film. Visually, the film is dark and reminiscent of other del Toro flicks. Here, again, we see a half-man half-monster protagonist, akin to Hellboy's titular demonoid, The Shape Of Water's amphibious man and the vampiric transformation of Cronos.

But despite many of these similarities, Blade II always feels just a bit removed from the rest of del Toro's filmography, perhaps as a result of it being a franchise film he wasn't apart of from its inception. It doesn't match his gothic or fairytale sensibilities or have the naive innocence of the children of Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone or Cronos.