Daybreakers: The trailer was better.

Amongst the torrent of vampire related films premiering lately, the futuristic vamp thriller, Daybreakers hit theaters last week, and critics fell for the film’s thinly veiled allegories of the wasting of man’s recourses. After seeing the film myself however, I felt like I had just paid $7 to sit through 90 minutes of crap that should have gone straight to the SyFy channel and skipped theaters all together.
The film is set in the year 2019, under the pretense that an outbreak of vampires has essentially led to the near extinction of the human race, leaving the UV intolerant inhabitants of the world looking for solutions to replenish their rapidly dwindling supply of human blood. To make matters worse, researchers have discovered that an extended period without the nourishment that human blood offers is causing a mutation in the deprived vampires and turning them into wild bat-like creatures that creep around in the underground tunnels, and break into suburban homes.
The main character, Edward Dalton, played by Ethan Hawke is the head scientist on a team attempting to create a life sustaining blood substitute. Dalton, unlike his fanged cohorts believes that the blood substitute will help end the hunting of humans and give the human race time to repopulate. When it becomes increasingly obvious that this will not be the case, however Dalton joins ranks with a band of human survivors on the run from the vampire military.
Here enters my favorite character in the film, Lionel ‘Elvis’ Cormac, played by Willem Dafoe. Let me begin by saying that the fact that he was my favorite character at all really says something about this film because in a normal situation Willem Dafoe scares the crap out of me. But I digress, although it is never explained why Cormac’s friends call him Elvis, he comes on the scene with some hot muscle cars, big guns, and an idea to cure vampirism all together. Thinking that the vampire cure may be an answer to their problem, Dalton tests it on himself and after a few failed attempts, his Cullen-esque yellow vampire eyes fade and he becomes human again.
Dalton then approaches the vampires he used to work for, with the help of the humans only to find that he was pretty much the only one that was not happy with being a vamp, and that a blood substitute has been developed in his absence, effectively obliterating his bargaining chip. The climax of the film is a complete cluster of random plot twists ending in a bloody vampire feeding frenzy that looks like something out of Left 4 Dead 2.
The only hope that I had during this film, that perhaps it would not be a complete waste of money was during the end battle scene. Due to technical difficulties the film suddenly looked like it was about to burn in the projector and I sat there silently hoping that it would go up in flames so that I could get a refund.
I think that overall, the biggest disappointment about Daybreakers was that it really did have potential to be an amazing film. However due to the lack of compelling dialogue, graphics that look straight out of the 90’s, and a cast of boring depthless characters, what it ended up being was a total train wreck, leading me to wonder if they blew the entire 21 million dollar budget of the film on crack and booze.
On the bright side, this movie did show me a new less horrifying side of Willem Dafoe, and it put Ethan Hawke back on my radar as an actor I might go on a date with, if Robert Pattinson, Paul Walker, and Gerard Butler all already had plans.