"Blade 2" begins by revealing that Whistler, who was mauled by vampires in the first "Blade," has been turned into a vampire and is being kept in stasis as bait for Blade. After torturing some information out of some vampires, Blade finds Whistler and takes him back to his base, where he makes him human again with an extremely painful retro-virus. Before Whistler even has a chance to say "ouch," vampires are suddenly somersaulting into Blade's lair. After an extremely long fight scene during which Blade is almost killed on numerous occasions, you find out that the vampires are simply there to offer a truce.
Blade is then taken to the inner sanctum of the Vampire Nation, where he is told that there is a new species of vampires called Reapers, who feast on the blood of both humans and vampires. They ask Blade to lead an elite team of vampires, unsubtly called the Bloodpack, in order to do away with these Reapers and save humanity (as well as the vampires). Blade hesitantly agrees. The rest of the movie consists of Blade killing lots of Reapers with the help of a perpetually high techy friend named Scud (Norman Reedus) and Bloodpack members such as the beautiful Nyssa (Leonor Varela) and the untrustworthy Reinhardt (Ron Perlman).
As Blade, Wesley Snipes really sinks his teeth into the juicy part of the ultra-cool vampire slayer. Buffy has absolutely nothing on this guy. The other performances are all on par for a B-grade-horror-action type movie, making what they can out of lines like, "Before I knew it they started tearing pieces of flesh out of me," with a great turn by Ron Perlman as the despicable Reinhardt, a vampire you hate to love.
The most obvious difference between "Blade 2" and the orginal is that "Blade 2" is directed by Guillermo del Toro, a very welcome change from "Blade's" director Stephen Norrington. Del Toro's artful direction results in gorgeous cinematography with some exhilarating moving shots and some well-done action scenes, as computer generated as they may be.
"Blade 2" also obviously had a larger budget than "Blade," a fact that is painfully obvious by something I like to call "the vampire exploding effect." In the Blade movies, when a vampire is killed, it spectacularly disintegrates into ashes. In the first movie, this effect was incredibly used in the opening scene, but about a quarter of the way through the film, the vampires stop dying in this fashion and simply lay there, presenting an embarrassingly bad continuity problem. This problem is not present in "Blade 2" at all, where throughout the film, the vampires and Reapers always experience special-effects laden deaths.
But, as much as I like to make fun of the glaring plot inconsistencies, the sometimes-questionable acting, the cheesy dialogue and the myriad of other "problems" people might have with the film, in the end "Blade 2" is simply one of Hollywood's best examples of its adherence to entertainment as a guiding principle. It's a good horror-action movie, nothing more and nothing less. However, it is a very enjoyably good horror-action movie sporting one of the best directors in the business, some great special effects and a gratuitously cool title character, which, like a Lindt truffle, makes you enjoy the partaking, but leaves you always wanting more in the end.