All That Blood and Nowhere to Go

Disappointing Plot Ruins the Gory Light in Daybreakers
By Morgan P Salvo
2 ½ stars

Beginning with ultra cool shots and dreamlike photography, Daybreakers shows promise, but with all of its flourishing potential (and tons of blood and gore) it starts to fall apart midway and never recovers. The Spierig Brothers directed The Undead, a fairly unknown and underrated Australian zombies-from-space flick. This time the pair of sibling directors traded in zombies for vampires and daytime for night. Daybeakers is an apocalyptic vision wherein vampires rule the world. This movie is great in some parts and very disappointingly bad in others.
Thanks to a viral epidemic a decade ago, most of the world’s population has turned into vampires, and a huge corporation oversees a sterile, clinical slaughterhouse that creates the world’s blood supply. A brute-force vampire military hunts and herds humans like cattle. Problem is the blood supply is dwindling. Ethical vampire chemist Edward (Ethan Hawke) is attempting to find a blood substitute but it’s not that easy. Without human blood vampires are starving to death, their physical deterioration resembling bat-winged meth-heads. The covert underground consists of a few straggling human survivors wielding cross bows and shotguns. Along the way we get heroes, heroines, bad guys, conflicted brothers, a bunch of moron faceless military, oh and vampires--- tons o’ them.
There are some nice parallels to the stock market crash and corporate greed but that morphs by the end to the typical super villain battling extreme do-gooder. The facility that houses the bodies for blood draining looks like a combination of the nesting plants from Coma and the Matrix. Apparently our newly acquired Hollywood vampire heritage dictates all male lead vampires must be named Edward – at least this one doesn’t wear his pants down to his crotch or sparkle…
Daybreakers has three lead characters that come off very cartoonish, with no real acting top speak of, just grandstanding. Sam Neil as Bromley gives us a vampire version of Gordon Gecko with wretched parenting skills. Willem Dafoe’s characterization of hot-car loving “Elvis” is all over the map: intellectual one second, hick the next. Sincere and pensive, Hawke seems almost bored in his role.
Beautifully shot and masterfully crafted including well-framed architectural structures, Daybreakers’ feel of a graphic novel soon dwindles. It’s like the film just can’t keep up with the myriad of ideas it dishes out. Soon the focus zones in on a cure that makes little or no sense. But even while there are huge glaring discrepancies in the plot Daybreakers still wrings out the gore like bad debris with obvious body-ripping nods to George Romero’s Dawn and Day of the Dead, and scores a few points for some decent car chases, a shackled death march into sunlight frying scene, blood cocktails in wine bottles, an impressive first kill and one scene containing the best blood-spattering body explosion ever!
The big climax dives into preachy sentimentality and the remaining plot is as messy as the blood cocktails the vampire vendors sell on the street. Even worse were the schmaltzy moments accented by sweltering strings that sounded plucked from TV’s Lassie soundtrack.
The cornball ending needed a more fitting twist. It just sort of stagnated into a quick fix conclusion and wallowed in the blood drenched finale. It seemed that The Spierigs had a really good idea, the right stuff and all the correct moves but when it was time to hit the theaters the film was handed over to the Hollywood execs, or thirteen year olds, who we all know are capable of making bad decisions.
Despite a lush, dark universe, Daybreakers seems forever stuck in no man's land between sci-fi and horror. Such a shame… all that blood with nowhere to go.
Daybreakers
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Sam Neil, Claudia Karvan
Written / directed: the Spierig Bros