Daybreakers (2010)

It’s January again, which means that between the holdovers from the holiday awards-bait movies, theaters wedge in a few new releases that aren’t good enough for accolades of any kind. Lionsgate continues this dubious tradition with the release of Daybreakers, another cliché-ridden attempt to cash in on the ridiculous vampire craze permeating nearly every avenue of pop culture these days. Honestly, it’s a tired pun to say that vampires suck, but with two current television series based on them, plus the Twilight books and movies, as well as weaker contributions like last year’s Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, I’m begging and pleading for a moratorium on the whole fanged, blood-swilling subject.

Daybreakers is set in the year 2019, about ten years after a plague spread around the world and turned nearly everyone into vampires. This means that now cars have sun shields and are driven with the use of roof-mounted cameras, subways (inexplicably without subway trains) are used for subterranean walking during the daylight, and people —excuse me, vampires — have glowing eyes and fangs and like to mix a little cream in their evening AB-negative coffee. And because they only come out at night, everything’s lit with blue-white lights to make it all look futuristic.

But there’s a big problem looming: they’re running out of humans to capture and harvest for fresh blood. With blood supplies reduced and rationed, the vampires are starting to starve, and the results are not pretty or cool-looking at all. They degenerate into “subsiders,” winged masses of zombie-like undead flesh that desperately attack anyone.

Ethan Hawke walks directly from the set of Gattaca without changing his clothes or surroundings to play Edward Dalton, chief hematologist at a giant pharmaceutical company who’s searching for a blood substitute without success. His bloodsucking boss is played by Sam Neill, always in a dark suit and black necktie in a large and imperious office, so you know he’s evil. In fact, his character’s dark emotional secret is that he wasn’t able to “turn” his estranged daughter.

Dalton is emotionally compromised, as well, because his gung-ho human-hunting soldier brother, Frankie (Michael Dorman), was the one who “turned” him years ago. (“Life’s a bitch, and then you don’t die,” Edward tells his brother while the audience groans.) So Edward Dalton still has a tiny amount of sympathy for humans, which is why he ends up with a band of fugitive humans, led by token love interest Audrey Bennett (Claudia Karvan) and a hot-rod loving car restorer who calls himself Elvis (Willem Dafoe). Elvis reveals his big secret to Dalton: he was once a vampire, but discovered a painful but effective cure. Dalton finds that it works, and he purges his body of the bloodsucking disease. Of course, then he has to confront his boss, who megalomaniacally replies, “What’s to cure?”

This movie, written and directed by The Spierig Brothers — apparently a low-rent wannabe version of the Wachowski Brothers — is utterly predictable from first frame to last, lacks any artistry in its writing or directing, and is thoroughly drenched in blood and very disgusting gore, which is also predictable, as Lionsgate is the same studio that puts out those reprehensible Saw movies year after year. It rips off every conceivable vampire cliché, especially those of the modern-day vampire tales like Kathryn Bigelow’s movie, Near Dark. There’s even a cornball shot of Ethan Hawke’s headless attire reflected in the side-view mirror of his car, a disembodied moving shirt like in The Invisible Man. Worst of all, the movie trots out the stale and insipid concept — stock in trade for the Twilight set — that being a vampire is somehow romantic, and that eternal life with pale white skin and an insatiable thirst for blood is preferable over human existence. Yawn. Put a wooden stake in it and move on, people.

We all like to wish people a happy new year, but movies like Daybreakers certainly don’t contribute to one for critics or audiences. I wish the Spierig brothers would’ve exposed their film to daylight before it was processed, so it would have burned away like the vampires themselves.