In the “Daybreakers” future, the vampires have it all worked out. No longer just nocturnal, they now run the show — day and night.
They’re not “cursed.” Can’t drive during the day? Fit cars with blackout windows and drive by video screen. Need blood? It’s farmed in gigantic, dairy-style processing facilities, where the few surviving humans are captured and then sucked dry.
But that blood supply is about to run out. For the blood baron (Sam Neill), that’s a cause for concern. He has his best man on it, hematologist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke, pale and fanged).
Edward will find a blood substitute, something they can bottle like pinot noir, something red and yummy that Vampire Planet can spritz into its morning espresso. Something that will keep the vampires from devolving into uncivilized wraiths, preying on one another. Something that will ease Edward’s anti-blood- sucking conscience.
“Daybreakers” is a stylish but unavoidably silly sci-fi vampire thriller, shot in that “Matrix”/”Gattaca” future- scape of Australia. German co-directors the Spierig brothers, dazzle us with the inventiveness of this post-human world where Uncle Sam has fangs.
Then Edward stumbles into the human underground where survivors (Willem Dafoe, with a crossbow, and Claudia Karvan) are holding out against extinction.
Whatever the movie was, it becomes a too-conventional hunters-hunted “rebels” tale, with Hawke stuck listening to human lines like these: “We’ve been searching for vampires we can trust” and “My friends call me Elvis!”
The best scenes are between Hawke and Neill, who wears a mean pair of fangs and makes their moments together sort of a “Job Interview With the Vampire.” Neill almost makes the environmental parable at play here (greedy capitalist using up resources) work. But those moments are lost once the explode-in-sunlight/stake- through-the-heart business revs up.
“Daybreakers” reminds us that from “Twilight” to “Underworld,” “True Blood” to “The Vampire Diaries,” this is one genre where supply has utterly overwhelmed demand.
“DAYBREAKERS.”
R for strong bloody violence, language and brief nudity. 1 hour, 38 minutes. Directed by Michael and Peter Spierig; starring Ethan Hawke, Sam Neill, Claudia Karvan and Willem Dafoe. Opens today at area theaters.
