This is Executive produced by Carpenter and instead is Tommy Lee Wallace as director. Jon Bon Jovi wasn’t much of a turn off from this movie for me, because I love his music and he’s a great actor, so he was able to hold the fort as the lead man. He’s a surfer boy in this movie so he often gripes about how he’d rather be surfing than hunting vampires. In the original we saw hunters hunting because it was for the church, in here it’s assumed more as a workaday job. He has a lot of cool weapons including a surfboard that doubles as a case for his weapons. He has a great grimace every hero should have in these types of movies, and he wears it well, often facing off against vampires.
There’s a great scene where he’s in Mexico and he fights off three vampires in a church. Bon Jovi has a lot of charisma and the parts when he is on his own are the best scenes. Natasha Wagner is ridiculously sexy as the villainous and proves to be an admirable foe. A lot of the movie is comprised of surprisingly exciting fight scenes and tense moments where the characters are often stuck in a corner. Unfortunately, one character alone can not make a movie any good, it takes a good script and great supporting cast to help a movie become entertaining and this has none of the above.
Jon Bon Jovi may be a great leading man and his character Derek is a great character be he is nothing compared to Jack Crow, the original hero from the first one. Often times, Derek is soft and whiney and never shows any marbles, unlike Jack who was tough as nails and took no bull from any one. His supporting characters are terrible and are resorted to stereotypes. He’s teamed up with a young Mexican boy with an awful Mexican accent, often complaining and lagging behind. At one of the most ridiculous points in the movie, the boy insists on going with Derek to the nest and brings a note from his mother to let him go with him. Ugh.
We also have a Mexican priest who looks like a Calvin Klein model, Ray the hunter for hire who bears a horrible Texas accent and a young girl Zoe who is was bitten by a vampire and hams her way throughout the movie. The villainous is probably the cheesiest aspect of the movie; she’s often scowling and growling her way through the movie walking crooked and looking very ridiculous. She’s nothing compared to the original vampire bad-ass Valek from the original. A great leading man is nothing with bad dialogue, an inept story, and terrible supporting cast.