Daybreakers

I know a guy doing a review of a vampire action/horror flick is kind of against everything our website is about, but we were able to attend a screening of this film and nobody else wanted to do a review of it, so here I am.

I’m a big fan of just about any movie with vampires/monsters/zombies/creatures/ghosts in them, so when I heard about Daybreakers I was quite excited. A vampire movie where the vamps have taken over the world and harvest humans just for their blood? Sounds awesome to me.

The premise is that in the year 2019, vampires rule the earth and there are only a handful of humans left. Because of this there’s nothing (or nobody) for the vampires to feed on so they need to create a synthetic blood substitute, enter Edward Dalton, played by Ethan Hawke. Meanwhile, a group of human survivors, which includes Elvis (cult favorite Willem Dafoe) and Audrey (Claudia Karvan), struggle to stay alive.  This plot seems pretty good, and it is, until about halfway through the film…  then it goes downhill.

About halfway through the movie I remember thinking to myself “I’m going to give this movie 4 and a half stars” but as you can see, somewhere between there and the end, we ended up at 3 stars… and here’s why.

Even though the plot was pretty strong for a vampire movie (i.e. there was more to it than ‘hunt the vampires’ or ‘I’m in love with a sparkly vampire and too stupid to know any better‘) they tried to throw in too many twists.  I won’t give anything away, but what started as a plot with a very scientific approach quickly became a plot that you were just supposed to buy because it was a movie about vampires. That was literally the reason given, Willem Dafoe says some to the effect of “What’s impossible is vampires are walking around without a pulse” and all of a sudden all logic is out the window.  When watching a movie, I can buy that vampires don’t breathe, don’t have a heartbeat, and don’t have reflections, but what I cannot buy is how this movie ends up explaining itself.

This may sound stupid, but what drove me nuts about this movie is a character named Frankie Dalton, played by Michael Dorman. Frankie is the brother of Ethan Hawke’s character, Edward. He is in the vampire army and his job is hunt and capture humans so that the vampire government can hook ‘em up to machines and suck the blood from them. Now, for some reason, Frankie seems to be everywhere. If there’s a mission in the field, he’s there. When something needs done all the way at the top of the vampire chain of command (played by Sam Neill), Frankie is there. It just seems like every time anything happens, Frankie is there for no reason. Even when the scenes were back to back and across the country, he was in each scene.

Onto the third part of logic I didn’t buy, the vampires self-control. The vampires were constantly faced with blood and they were able to control themselves just fine, but when there was a character that needed killed off (and you knew it), hordes of vampires would, for no apparent reason, lose their minds and just attack like animals. Either have them be crazy or have them be calm and proper, but not both.

Even though I did a lot of griping and moaning in here, I can say that I was entertained throughout the film.  I was taken out of it a few times and thought “really?” but it was, nevertheless, enjoyable.  Up to about the halfway point, I would have guessed this would be one of the best genre films I’ve seen to date, but unfortunately that didn’t hold true.  It’s definitely not on par with the likes of 30 Days of Night, Blade II, or Interview with a Vampire, but it’s still worth watching… just maybe not in the theater.