Daybreakers Review

Published by Jeff Leins on: January 18th, 2010

In the last few years, we’ve seen a rebirth of the vampire genre.  Bursting back onto the scene with Stephenie Meyer’s chaste Twilight saga, the trend permeated pop culture until romanticized versions of the undead infiltrated television programming and filled multiplexes with defanged teen drama.

Amidst the overabundance of vampire movies, Daybreakers finds fresh meat in the genre with a concept that explores what happens to Earth’s population when vampire fever really catches on.

The year is 2019, ten years after a viral outbreak transformed most people from ordinary coffee drinkers into, well, coffee drinkers with a splash of hemoglobin.  Society is more or less the same — the daily bustle of commuters in suits — except for a nocturnal lifestyle, public service reminders of the life-threatening sunrise, and an insatiable thirst for human blood.

Sam Neil plays the sly CEO of a corporation that harvests humans like cattle to replenish the dwindling supply.  Fueled by familiar media scare tactics, fear grips the vampiric ranks whose primal instincts surface, while the deprived deteriorate into bat-like fiends.  Facing a crisis quickly turning chaotic, management puts pressure on vampire hemotologist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) to find a viable scientific alternative.

The hunger for blood, coupled with the use of military force to capture new resources, serves as a flimsy metaphor for our dependency on foreign oil, but luckily writer/directors Michael and Peter Spierig avoid preaching political ideologies to focus only on converting people into vampires not liberals.

Hawke’s Dalton is a mild-mannered rebel and a human sympathizer with hopes that a blood substitute can halt the depletion of the endangered human race.  A small act of kindness soon has him swept up in an underground human resistance movement led by Audrey (Claudia Karvan, later a forced love interest) and protected by Elvis (Willem Dafoe), a former blood drinker who inadvertently discovered a cure for chronic vampirism.

The trio sets out into the dangerous world of sunbeams to prove their theory and restore humanity to an increasingly savage populace.  The second half is filled with B-movie moments, but there’s enough silly carnage and heavy-duty crossbow action to provide a pulse to their blood-splattered chase.  The end for a vampire is apparently either a fiery inferno or a blood bomb explosion, which makes for a few gory massacres that will satisfy bloodthirsty horror fans.  In short, there was a whole lot more death than I expected from a movie about the undead.

In their sophomore effort, the Spierigs show promise as filmmakers with a unique vision for horror.  Daybreakers is more entertaining than the subgenre offerings of late, but is still probably better left for a rainy day.

3 out of 5.