Film Review: Daybreakers (Spoilers)

There’s a downright great idea here, buried under a great morass of excessive overstyling and script failures. That’s not to say that ‘Daybreakers’ isn’t entertaining – it is – but its clever premise is brought down by never living up to the ideas it sets out, and because of lackadaisical direction by the Spierig brothers (who also co-wrote the film). It’s a shame because the idea of a world dominated racially by vampires is a novel one – would it too socially stratify, and what would vampiric corporate America’s priorities be? If the principal industrialised commodity were human blood, what would the social and business ramifications be of a shortage? Environmentalism in a vampire movie could have given space for a truly incisive (ahem) social commentary, but Michael and Peter Spierig eschew one in favour of simple blood and gore, overstylised visuals, and zingy one-liners.

Hunky Ethan Hawke plays Edward Dalton, a hematologist unhappy with vampirism and its farming of humans to near extinction. His attempts to formulate a blood substitute for boss Sam Neill (whose human cancer was undone by his conversion to vampirism) amount to naught, he fights with brother Michael Dorman, a success in the vampiric armed forces having been a failure in its human analogue, and faces gradual starvation as both sides face mutually assured destruction. That is until he crosses paths with Willem Dafoe’s band of humans, some survivors and some ex-vampires, who reveal the existence of a cure. The race is then on to safeguard the remaining humans, whilst saving the vampires – has vampirism stripped them of their morals or has immortality merely accentuated what was already there?

From a great start – corporate boss Neill overseeing the human blood farms, facing a dip in profits as scarcity pushes the price up, and vampires attacking ‘lower class’ vampires, it descends into a barely coherent second half, replete with moody glares at the screen but not much in the way of intelligible plotting. Hawke gets himself cured, so why is he still sleepwalking through the role? Why does Dafoe spend more time with classic one-liners than actually fulfilling an interesting function in the story? What happened to the politics? Neill rejects the cure but he’s the bad guy, but would others also say ‘what’s to cure?’ Why just ignore the social implications of vampirism when they informed so much of the first half of the movie? It all gets left behind in the Spierig brothers’ eagerness to deliver the blood, guts and gore which must have been expected of them. But whilst that element is entertaining, it isn’t something you haven’t seen countless times before. So many good ideas, such half-hearted execution.

6.5/10