Review: Daybreakers

Ethan Hawke wants YOU to see his new movie

Throwback red titles and eerie opening credits perhaps set the bar a little too high for Daybreakers, an ambitious, bloody mixed bag of new tricks, some of which work, and some that don't. It's an original concept thrown into the worlds of Blade, Blade Runner, and 28 Days Later... In other words, it's thrown to the dogs, but some pretty well-trained and likable ones at that.

It's 2019, and obviously, things are bad (where's my utopian "a few years from now" future?). Vampires have taken the stage and humans are hunted and farmed in processing plants that somehow fit in skyscrapers. Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) just so happens to be the Chief Hermatologist of Bromley-and-something, the central harvesting organization headed by sleazy-creepster Charles Bromley (Sam Neill). Enter a chance encounter with a Toyota—ironically driven by people who are still human—and Dalton finally acts on his feelings, helping the humans with vampires while they help him become human again. Yeah, yeah, it's all nice.

There's a lot of easy-lay casting going on here...Ethan Hawke as the hero who questions his futuristic plight (Gattaca), William Dafoe as the all-American rebel underdog (okay, no example, but the glove fits too tight, especially the crossbow), and, of course, B-movie showman Sam Neill (Event Horizon) as the big creepy boss with familial issues. The new bro's on the block (twins too), the Spierig Brothers, are definitely raw talents, with emphasis on the raw. Their direction is at times refreshingly unconventional (aforementioned credits) and others strictly anything but. There are so many little brilliant moments—almost too many to remember—but the weak, shortchanged script compliments those moments will countless eye-rollers; at some point in the middle it was literally back and forth: whoa, eye-roll, whoa, eye roll, eye roll, eye-roll, eye-roll, whoa.

For a movie about a lack of blood, there's sure plenty of it to go around on-screen—there were stretches I felt I was in a permanent cringe and that my back or neck was going to suffer for it. And visually, that was really the only thing Daybreakers had going for it: the Spierig's need to get hooked up with ILM or at least in cahoots with James Cameron or Lucas because their special effects are straight outta 1997, where even something like Spawn looks better. It's the kind of bad C.G.I. we've been trained on, but shit, man, it's 2010 and Avatar already happened. Get with the program.

Somewhere near the pivotal, third-act plot twist, someone in the audience muttered, in melodramatic tenor, "The Daybreakers," and I couldn't help but laugh. That sentiment is exactly the problem with this film, it's an A movie's mind stuck in a B movie's body, and stuck in a thick, jammy-jelly sort of way, thrashing about while it can until ultimately embracing its lower bar. But if there were three words that could properly summarize my experience, they would be these: So much blood. Extra half-star for effort.


**1/2 out of ****

~ Patrick Fryberger