Blade: Trinity is the third and final film in the Blade Trilogy. It was released in 2004.
To defeat Blade and finally make their kind invulnerable, the vampires have awakened the original vampire progenitor Drake to help them. Meanwhile, Blade is joined by a duo of human vampire hunters called the Nightstalkers.
This film provides examples of:
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: Blade cuts into a metal pole with his sword, by accident. Also, when Drake swings his sword at Blade and Blade dodges, he cuts through a metal banister.
- Actor Allusion: Jarko's fight scene with Hannibal throws in a few notable wrestling maneuvers.
- Action Girl: Abigail.
- Adapted Out: The Nightstalkers from the comics were gathered by Doctor Strange and included veteran vampire slayer Frank Drake aside from Blade and King, but none of them appear in the film.
- As Long as It Sounds Foreign: The film features nearly subliminal use of Esperanto to make the setting seem a little off and vaguely foreign. This is most noticeable when Hannibal watches the Esperanto language horror film Incubus in his hospital bed, starring William Shatner pre-Star Trek.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Nearly everything about Abigail Whistler, but her situational-awareness-killing personal soundtrack is at the top of the list. The UV Laser comes close second, because slicing through things like butter may sound good, but when a UV lamp hurts them and not you, and a normal sword is sufficient to dust them... why risk lightsabering yourself? They never use it more than once, anyway.
- Backing into Danger: After Hannibal King defeats some Reaper-strain-looking vampire dogs, he starts walking backwards while Flipping the Bird. Then he falls through a broken skylight.
- Big Bad: Drake (Dracula) is the movie's main antagonist.
- Bond One-Liner: "My friends are coming to kill you."
- Bury Your Disabled: One of the Nightstalkers, Sommerfield, is blind. She doesn't make it to the end of the film.
- Casual High Drop: When being broken out of the FBI building by Abigail and Hannibal King, Blade briefly breaks off from the group and jumps up a ventilation shaft. Immediately after Hannibal and Abigail escape on the ground floor, Blade jumps out of a higher window and lands unharmed, saying he only took the detour because he "forgot his sword".
- Continuity Nod: Both the dogs and Drake himself sport Reaper-like jaws and tongue.
- Convection, Schmonvection: Although it might be hyperbole, Abigail holds a UV laser that is "half as hot as the Sun" in front of her face. To say nothing of the power requirements for that...
- Cool Boat: Nightstalkers' base of operations
- Country Matters: From Hannibal King to Danica Talos in one of the most memorable insults in the franchise.King: See, that tickle that you're feeling in the back of your throat right now? That's atomized colloidal silver. It's being pumped through the building's air conditioning system, you cock-juggling thundercunt!
- Cute Creature, Creepy Mouth: Vampiric dogs have a mouth that splits into two at the lower jaw, and a tongue-like appendage that ends with another mouth. This includes Pacman, the vampiric pomeranian.
- Dead Guy on Display: When Dracula cuts a bloody swathe through Nightstalker HQ, he makes sure to leave Sommerfield's half-naked and mutilated body strung up with a message for the heroes to find. This just pisses them off.
- Deadpan Snarker: Hannibal King is a master of this. It doesn't hurt that he is played by Ryan Reynolds.
- Demonic Vampires: Drake's true form
is a tall, demonic figure with red skin and horned appendages on his head. - Disposable Vagrant: The People Farms use homeless people, as explained proudly by the police chief:Chief Reede: They got processing centres in every major city. In any given time there's what, two, three million homeless wandering around America. They just pull them in off the streets. Nobody cares about them. We're doing this country a service, really.
- Dirty Coward: In their first confrontation, Drake grabs a baby to keep Blade from attacking him, then tosses it as a distraction to escape. This while making a speech about how they, unlike everyone else, know about honour and dying by the sword. Possibly justified in that Drake was unarmed while Blade was not; Drake does fight Blade on fair terms later on, which would suggest he was waiting for an even match or simply wanted to talk first.
- Epic Flail: In the opening scene Blade carries a knife that with the push of a button, can launch its blade a short distance (like a ballistic knife). However, the blade is attached to a wire or chain of some sort, allowing it to function as a bladed flail after being launched. After the battle, Blade tells Whistler "This worked real good" (and then never uses it again, presumably because he is stripped of it by the FBI).
- Everyone Owns a Mac: EVERYONE uses Mac computers, and even features a scene where Jessica Biel's character uses iTunes to create a music playlist for her iPod that she can listen to while fighting vampires (never mind that having music blaring into your ears would be detrimental to your situational awareness in a battle with undead bloodsuckers). More than one reviewer has commented that the film is basically a two-hour-long commercial for Apple products.
- Fan Disservice: The extended scene of Abby taking a shower would be straight up Fanservice, except for the focus on her numerous battle wounds and the amount of blood she washes off.
- Final Solution: Both the heroes and the villains have a plan to end the conflict between humans and vampires by wiping out the opposing race. The vampire's plan isn't well explained though, how they intend to destroy humanity was never addressed outside of using Drake somehow.
- Flower Mouth: Drake and the "vampire dogs" have a bottom jaw that splits into two halves.
- Four Lines, All Waiting: Is it about vigilante Blade versus human law enforcement, the upcoming blood-farming vampire apocalypse, the Nightstalkers' attempt to create his own apocalypse via The Virus, or the symbolic war of Blade vs. Dracula? Concentrating on any two of these plotlines would have worked, but not four. Wesley Snipes was reportedly very upset that the core character was lost in the plot shuffle.
- Godzilla Threshold: The act of seeking out Drake is this for the vampires. Apparently, Blade's success in hunting and killing high-level vampires has shaken their world to the point of desperation. So now the plan has become to use Drake's blood to become daywalkers, wipe out the humans entirely and live off of blood farms.
- Grand Finale: Intended as the end of the film series in many ways. For starters, the film involves Blade carrying out a mission to end the vampire threat for good, plus the main villain is Dracula. There's no better way to end a film series about a hero who hunts vampires than to have him face the most famous vampire of all.
- Guilt-Free Extermination War: The vampire antagonists of this movie are planning to take over the world and farm all of humanity for blood now that they have Drake, whilst the Nightstalkers in turn are hoping that they can use the Daystar virus to wipe out all vampires on Earth once the virus is completed with Drake's blood. On one hand, the first movie was pretty clear that vampires are Always Chaotic Evil monsters, regardless of who they used to be when they were human; on the other hand, the first movie also showed that some if not most elite vampires are more reasonable and pragmatic than the trilogy's antagonists, willing to maintain the status quo of living alongside humanity without usurping us. The moral and ethical questions about whether or not the Nightstalkers' plan for total vampire extermination is really justified get more disturbing in light of the sequel TV series' introduction of the House of Leichennote — however, it should also be noted that even the series makes it clear that the only really "good" vampires whose personalities aren't twisted out of shape after turning are ones who've subsisted mainly on Blade's blood-substitute serum more than actual blood since being turned, and there wasn't any such vampire in existence before Krista Starr was turned during the series.
- Guns Akimbo: Blade, Hannibal, and Abigail all sometimes fight with a gun in each hand.
- Hero Harasses Helpers: Blade doesn't take too kindly to the Nightstalkers.
- Hero Secret Service: The Nightstalkers prioritize ensuring Blade's safety.
- High-Altitude Interrogation: A mook is dangled in an attempt to lead the protagonists to the Big Bad, but he refuses to talk. Then his cell rings. Blade answers, tells the mook it's for him, and lets go of the rope.
- Idiot Ball: Blade is fooled into killing a human familiar disguised as a vampire, despite having the instincts to distinguish between the two! Remember that in the first movie he could smell a vampire from roughly 40 feet away, and can even differentiate vampire and human by the way they move, so there is no way he should have been fooled (unless the familiar was deliberately drenched in vampire scent, something that is never mentioned in the film).
- Inconveniently Vanishing Exonerating Evidence: Inverted, as Blade is tricked into killing a familiar instead of a vampire so that the body doesn't disintegrate in the sunlight.
- Industrialized Evil: The vampires' 'final solution'.
- In Name Only: Hannibal King. In the comics, he is a middle-aged (in appearance) Vampire 50's style hard-boiled private investigator. In the film, he is a 20-or-so-year-old wise-cracking vampire hunter who was cured of vampirism before the film began. Most of the change is probably down to the casting.
- Joke Name Tag: The Nightstalkers use nametags with "Hi My Name Is Fuck You" when they bait some vampires into an ambush.
- Killer Rabbit: The vampire Pomeranian, "Pac-Man".
- Kryptonite-Proof Suit: Anti-sun excursion suits.
- Lighter and Softer: This installment is much cornier than the first two (or at least the first).
- Lock-and-Load Montage: Both Blade and Abigail.
- Monster Progenitor: Drake ( Dracula) is the first vampire.
- Mugging the Monster: Vampire hoods try to molest Action Girl Jessica Biel and get staked.
- Oh, Crap!: When Hannibal sees Dr. Vance standing over his own corpse, he fumbles for his gun, shouting "Oh Jesus, it's him! Abby! It's Drake!"
- Our Werewolves Are Different: The werewolf shown in one of the alternate endings is more man-like.
- People Farms: Blade and friends discover a facility where the vampires are keeping racks of comatose people alive to harvest for blood. It's revealed that this is their plan to survive once they dominate the human world.
- Product Placement: All the computers are Apple brand. The fact that Abigail likes to listen to an iPod while fighting vamps is made into a character trait. There's even a little montage of her putting together a playlist.
- Psycho Poodle: One of the "vampire dogs" is a poodle and is quite vicious, though not as much as the vampire rottweiler.
- Repeated Cue, Tardy Response: Hannibal King is captured by the villains and reveals that he had a tracking device, allowing his teammates to know his exact location. He then gives a verbal cue, expecting a Big Damn Heroes moment. It doesn't come and he nervously asks for a cellphone.
- Revised Ending: There are three alternate endings:
- Theatrical ending: As Blade fought honorably, Drake gives him a "parting gift" by transforming his dying body into a replica of Blade's. The FBI retrieves the body of who they think is Blade and thus calls off their manhunt. Just as they begin the autopsy, Blade's body reverts into that of Drake's. Hannibal's voiceover tells the viewer that Blade is still alive somewhere, finishing the last struggles of the war; having rejected Drake's hopes of prolonging the vampire race, Blade's war will never end.
- Unrated ending: The body retrieved by the FBI is Blade's, but he's not really dead. Drake's body is nowhere to be seen, hinting at his survival too. At the morgue, Blade sits up abruptly, attacks the FBI agents, and appears ready to bite a nurse on the neck. The ending is ambiguous as to whether Blade has retained his humanity or given in to his vampire thirst as Drake predicted. This is the ending that is seen on the director's cut of the film, and commentary on the DVD indicates it was the ending director Goyer intended.
- Werewolf ending: The Daystar virus circles the globe and wipes out all vampires. Blade walks off into the sunset, his long battle finally over. The final shot is of the Nightstalkers battling a new enemy: werewolves. This version of the ending was used in the novelization of the film and is included on the DVD as an extra.
- Sequel Hook: The audience is led to believe that Blade died fighting Drake/Dracula, but just before the credits roll, Drake is still alive, and the audience sees Blade riding away on his motorcycle, set to fight again another day. This actually depends on which cut you're watching.
- Smug Snake: Drake is pretty condescending toward humans.
- Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Instead of the film focusing on Blade, a group of hunters get the most attention with Blade showing up every now and again. The film suffered a huge backlash from the fans because of this and Wesley Snipes even sued, claiming they were whitewashing him for his own film franchise. However, given the myriad of rumours that Wesley Snipes allegedly couldn't be bothered to show up on set most of the time, leaving his stunt double having to perform most of the filming in his place; if true, then it's not entirely surprising that Blade ultimately doesn't appear much.
- Tempting Fate: TripleH!Jarko lets off a "you're not so big" line when Clan Talos arrives to abduct a heavily restrained and sedated Blade from the Police Department.
- The Blade Always Lands Pointy End In: Played painfully straight with both Blade's and Drake's swords.
- The Older Immortal: Drake ( Dracula), due to being the first of his kind, is the oldest vampire in existence.
- The Oner: subverted. The scene where Abigail Whistler takes on a whole crowd of mooks, one after the other, was filmed in a single take. In the finished film, it's intercut with other shots.
- Trick Arrow: Abigail Whistler uses, in addition to her normal arrows, a drill arrow, plague arrow, and an arrow that can shoot around corners.
- Uncle Tomfoolery: Inversion. The badass hero is a black guy and the jokey sidekick is white.
- Vagina Dentata: Danica Talos's fangs are NOT in her mouth, at least according to Hannibal King.
- Villain Decay: The vampires, with the sole exception of Drake, in this movie are...really fucking lame. They're incompetent and immature, and you never really get the sense that they pose a threat to Blade or any of the Nightstalkers. It's a bad sign when the cops are the second most dangerous entity in a film with Dracula.
- The Virus: Daystar.
- Worthy Opponent: Drake (Count Dracula) is far more interested in fighting Blade due to his reputation than for any reason related to helping his debased great-great-great grandspawn.
- You Have Failed Me: A familiar tries to avoid talking to Blade by insisting that he'll be killed for doing so. Blade angrily points out that he has no problem killing the familiar himself and will in fact enjoy it more.
