Review: DAYBREAKERS

The Spierig Brothers (Michael and Peter) follow up their 2003, loose-fitting zombie flick UNDEAD with something a little more straight and narrow.  The premise to DAYBREAKERS is fairly simple.  Ten years in the future, vampires walk the Earth en masse.  They have, essentially, taken over the planet, and the last, surviving humans are either captured and farmed for blood or they go underground, members of a small resistance trying to find a way to take back what was once theirs.  Ethan Hawke plays Edward Dalton, a vampire hematologist who is tasked with finding a suitable substitute for the blood vampires need.  If he is unable to, and the last drops of human blood run out, the vampires will turn into strange creatures who are more beast than man.

DAYBREAKERS begins with something out of the norm, a seemingly disconnected scene involving a young vampire girl fed up with never growing old.  She writes a note to her parents, walks out into the middle of a dirt road, and watches the sun come up.  It’s quite an interesting and different view of the vampire, something films and TV have been inundated with as of late.  Vampires, not the interesting and different views of them.

In fact, much of what is presented in the early moments of DAYBREAKERS is far more intriguing and fresh than the TWILIGHTs and the VAMPIRE DIARIES of the world.  The Spierigs certainly know what makes a typical vampire story, and they go out of their way early on to distill that feeling with their film.  We don’t have much of an explanation of what in the decade that gets the world to this point.  There are clues here and there, and even a bit of closed captioning on a passing television provides an out-of-the-norm example of expositionary narration.

Something else the early moments of DAYBREAKERS provides in spades is the exciting action.  The Spierigs don’t let an opportunity pass them by to throw in an intense creature scene or the  occasional, exploding body.  Before you are very much into the meat of this film’s story, you are fully aware that the people behind it aren’t afraid to turn on the gore and turn up the intensity.

And, then, something happens to the film that you might not see coming.  Sure, we know, at some point, Dalton, who is more acceptable of humans than most vampires in this world, is going to come across the resistance, and they are going to take him in to their ranks.  He meets Audrey, played by Claudia Karvan, just about the most one-dimensional resistance fighter you’re bound to see in a sci-fi film, and Lionel, played by Willem Dafoe, a one-time vampire who has a secret of his own.  Unfortunately, this happens far earlier in the film than it needs to, and the catalyst for it is a very well crafted chase sequence that becomes the peak of the film.  After a half hour, we are floored by the action and ready for the Spierigs to really kick our vampire-loving asses, but they don’t do that.  They do this from time to time, but it’s never on the same level as it is in those early moments.

DAYBREAKERS is not a horror film, as some may have guessed with it being a movie about vampires ruling the Earth and all.  The Subsiders, the creatures the vampire become if they have either A) not drank enough human blood or B) begin drinking the blood of other vampires, are the closest we really get to true horror in the film.  There are some rather intense and scary moments involving the Subsiders in the opening moments.  However, they quickly become an afterthought, a subplot that, eventually, become a deus ex machina for a few character choices.

As a whole, the film falls more in the sci-fi/action spectrum, and, because of this lack of horror envelope pushing, we never get a real sense of threat for any of the main characters.  Even when teams of vampires dressed in high-tech, military garb are stalking their prey, we are never fully on the edge of our seats.  This isn’t to say the last 2/3 of the film fall flat.  Far from it.  Even if many of the human resistance characters are stilted, meaningless, and about as shallow as a kiddie pool, the moments Hawke’s character has in the interaction with them is far more engaging and intelligent than much of anything we’ve seen in the sub genre, at least in recent years.

Much of this is to the testament of Hawke and Sam Neill’s performances, Hawke much more so, as he has become an actor in recent years who takes every role he has with absolute sincerity.  Even when he is in B movie roles like DAYBREAKERS or Roenick in the ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 remake, he gives it his all, and you can never fault him for that.  Neill plays the obligatory villain in a $1000 suit, but he, too, plays the part with everything he’s got.  Dafoe has a much more in-depth character than the other human members of the film, but he’s just not getting where he needs to be.  Most of the time, he comes off like a classless Redneck, and that’s not something Dafoe can easily pull off.

In the end, DAYBREAKERS succeeds in being a stylish and fruitful action film that often times brings the intelligence quotient much higher than even it needs to.  The Spierigs have come a long way since their debut film, a horror comedy mess that never seemed to truly be about anything.  There are cliches and predictability strewn throughout, it lags quite a bit through the middle section, and it never hits that same level of intensity as it does near the beginning of the film.  For all of these flaws, DAYBREAKERS still works on so many, other levels, partially from the matured story writing and direction of the Spierigs and partially from the firm performances of much of the cast.  DAYBREAKERS might not be a film that is every going to transcend its genre, nor does it seem the men behind it are going to any time soon, either, but it is certainly a film that will make fans of the vampire genre thirst for more.