Daybreakers

In an era where vampire movies are comically hit or miss (hit – Let The Right One In, miss – anything with angsty teenagers who sparkle) I went into Daybreakers with an open mind.

Essentially, the story is that a single bat eventually turned most of humanity into vampires. Vampires run the world and they farm humans for their blood supply. There’s a huge vampire-run corporation that runs the blood-supply deal, which is, ya know, weird. I would think in a world run by vampires that anarchy would pretty much reign supreme. What is the point of making money in a society that, in all honesty, should no longer be based on capitalism? Sure, the blood supply may run out because of all the human murders, but I tend to think that vampires are ok with the ‘burning-the-candle-at-both-ends’ philosophy.

Anyways…

Lo and behold the blood shortage becomes a real problem. Enter Ethan Hawke, actor one of three who took this movie out of desperation. His job is to find a suitable blood substitute on which the vampires could survive. He fails. Like, hardcore fails. He fails so hard that a test vampire explodes in an orgy of red goo.

Hawke doesn’t like being a vampire and he refuses to drink human blood. This becomes a problem when his EARS START TO GROW because he isn’t drinking it. Yep. You just read that. And it cannot be unread. So he finds a human-turned vampire-turned human (Willem Dafoe) who tells him how he returned to being a human. To me, casting Dafoe as anything BUT a vampire is a bad choice.

To make an already long story short, the movie never really gets going and it was pretty much a waste of time. It could have been good, but if I lost 200 pounds I could be a model. Big deal.

The third desperate actor was Sam Neill, whose appearances in films is fascinating to watch. The Hunt For Red October, Jurassic Park and Event Horizon are off-set by horrid pieces of turd like Bicentennial Man and something called My Mother Frank. It is, to put it mildly, difficult to tell if he is a good actor or just an extremely lucky one.

Daybreakers isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen by any means, but it’s probably not going to make your night either.

Score – 60

PS – There is one pretty cool scene at the end where a bunch of vampires rapaciously start fucking each other up in the lobby of a building. Good times.