Review of Daybreakers (2010) by Michael J. W — 19 Mar 2011

Frustrating film which needed a few more re-writes to capitalise on an intriguing and quite original premise.

The film starts quite strong: the take is that humans have turned into vampires as part of a disease though people can be turned as in the mythological beast.

Trouble is that if everyone turns and gains immortality there are not enough humans to feed on hence farming of the remaining humans. Secondly, if a vampire is denied blood it devolves to a bat like creature. What this does is sets up a beautiful opportunity to satirise capitalism in a very stylish way and also it is the only film I remember in which vampires are in a way scared most of the time of being attacked or starving.

So the setup in which everyone is smoking (as it can't hurt you) and other stylish portrayals of vampires then gets wasted and incredibly unwieldy. Hawke plays a hematologist looking for a synthetic blood substitute (True Blood anyone:) and in this way the film starts to follow the dots as he meets the human resistance.

The unfortunate part is that from here on it is totally derivative and actually quite confusing and worse of all not much fun despite a pretty good cast.

I give these guys the benefit of the doubt and suspect they might do something quite original in the future.