Daybreakers

A nice glass of blood is flavour of the month right now. Twilight and its emo clan of tweenie vampires are sucking purses dry across the land as fans of Supernatural Romance dream of a nice young undead prettyboy to snuggle with. True Blood drips from the TV screens to both popular and critical success and even Old Boy director Chan-Wook Park can't control his Thirst. Vampires have conquered the world.

Quite literally, in the case of Daybreakers - a virulent blood plague has transformed most of the world's population into creatures of the night with a thirst for the warm red stuff. Humankind is now an endangered species. Fanged commuters queue for an extra blood shot in their evening coffee, while the majority of surviving humans exist only in massive blood banks, their essence drained away to feed rampant consumption. But this freedom to feast has come at a great price. Blood runs low, and there's little success with alternatives - This could be the death of the undead.

The Spierig Brothers' follow up to their impressive debut Undead is an interesting prospect. The central idea behind Daybreakers feels quite original in that it's trying to do something other than simply tap the vein that most Vampire films are drinking from, and that's surely one of the reasons why it's attracted talent such as Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill. In constructing their neon-lit vampire society, The Brother's have created a dense world and a complex story that fills the 97 minute running time to bursting point - and beyond.

This is the major problem with Daybreakers. There is so much going on in terms of setup and story that there's very little time for anything else. Large sequences are devoted to establishing concepts and introducing themes but there's hardly any character development. Ethan Hawke's central character, a vampire scientist working on a substitute for human blood, suffers especially badly and moves from scene to scene with a constant look of mild disinterest. Even when an enormously life changing moment occurs that has ramifications for the entire world, Hawke just sits gazing into the middle distance.

This sense of emotional disconnection isn't necessarily down to a bad performance, but more to the fact that there's very little space given to the audience to invest in these moments. Scenes and themes which should carry great pathos, such as a subplot involving Sam Neil's daughter, are rushed across the screen as in the blink of an eye, rarely giving anyone a chance to catch hold of the hooks and actually sympathise with what's going on. Time and again, we're introduced to what seem to be major characters only for them to be killed off moments later. There's no room to invest in who these people are or why they choose a particular path - everyone, audience and characters, just have to be swept along by the plot.

And it's not a bad plot. The tail flits about like a vampire bat after one too many Bloody Marys, often throwing quite unexpected events into the mix. The initial concept of a world run by vampires in which humans are hunted to the point of extinction is good, although the allegory between the vampires' draining of the world's resources and our own is often quite heavy handed. The film does try to push the vampire genre in new directions but every time it steps into the light it quickly stumbles back into the shadows.

For all the potential for originality and genre busting, Daybreakers never feels fresh. Part of this is down to the visuals - neo-noir cityscapes for the vampires' world contrasted with pastoral countryside for the day. While the noir look is crisp and the cinematography often very beautifully constructed, it feels like we've seen this in almost every dystopian movie since The Matrix. Due to the overuse of such imagery recently, scenes that should pack a punch such as a spectacularly apocalyptic slowmo bloodbath towards the end feel like just another Bullet Time rip off. It's a shame, as the noir theme looks great here and is carried through to costume and character design, with detectives and ordinary vampires looking like they've stepped out of They Live By Night.

This sense of déjà-vu seeps into other areas of the movie. Conveniences and clichés rise from the grave every time the film starts moving into interesting areas. Without heading into spoiler territory, a major discovery that could save vampire kind is enormously over simplistic and it's hard to believe that none of the scientists working on the problem would have investigated that area. What's achieved is done so easily and with so few negative effects that it's almost on the level of saying "Stop being a vampire!" and that working. I don't know - Perhaps someone else had discovered this potential solution, but it was covered up within vampire society. You see, Big Business is also at play here, and the blood substitute they work on has to be not only safe but cost effective for them. There's also an absolutely mind-boggling sequence set under a tree in daylight. Vampires are fine as long as they're not in direct sunlight which, it seems, only means sharp beams of light that you can carefully walk around. By this logic, any vampire could effectively go out wearing a poncho and sombrero or a golf umbrella, but hey-ho.

So much is packed into the short running time the film ends up feeling bloated by content. The script actually feels like it was written to be a much longer project, such as a miniseries, and the extra space would have benefited Daybreakers greatly. Subplots that developed characters would have room to breathe, rounding these people off to a point where we actually start to care about them rather than just seeing them as hero, lead girl, main bad guy, etc. Major obstacles that are overcome in a matter of minutes would be able to loom, giving menace and a sense of why people were struggling so desperately. What we have is so densely packed with exposition and revelation the movie ends up feeling slow and stodgy, even though so much is going on. Characters rarely feel like they're impacting the events, more being railroaded reactively towards a conclusion that sets up a potential sequel and feels stolen from Blade.

It's not all bad though. The film is enjoyable to watch and contains some excellent set pieces - a daylight car chase in particular. While overstuffed, the plot is interesting and the twists rewarding, despite some ludicrous clichés. The main problem with Daybreakers is that it ends up presenting congealed blood when you really wanted a nice black pudding.

Review by Paul Bird