In the movie industry, opportunity has a habit of knocking loudly, but sometimes that knock falls on deaf ears.

 

Take for instance the market for vampire films. In recent years, the genre has been taken over by the tween crowd as it became watered down, glamorized, and romanticized for the female audience thanks to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saturation. Rather than rewrite the genre though, it opened it up for adaptation, but more importantly, it left it open to return vampire movies to a seedier, darker place.

 

Daybreakers had a chance to step into that void and capture that forgotten audience. Unfortunately, it spent more time watching where it stepped just to keep from tripping over itself. The Ethan Hawke headlined film failed to really establish itself in any one genre whatsoever, straddling the lines of political messages, science fiction, and horror that is was more easily categorized as a fragment film than anything else.

 

And what better way to describe Daybreakers than as a fragment film, because let’s face facts, it was pieced together as if it was equally penned by multiple screenwriters, but it also felt like this movie had been made before. Hell, Ethan Hawke had made pieces of this movie on his own. Let’s run the list:

 

-         Movie about a future class system that isn’t perfect? Yup, Gattaca.

-          The naïve young man unaware of how the system really works? Twice, Training Day and Great Expectations.

-         Even the film where the hungry have to eat their own kind? Certainly, Alive anyone?

 

Still, the film had its qualities, both good and bad. Here’s how the movie breaks down without spoiling it:

 

The Good

 

The film started out promising, with some seriously dark sets. Granted that should be a given in any vampire movie this side of Twilight, but the job creating a futuristic vampire utopia was pretty solid. The imagery of the blood bank seemingly borrows a bit from the Matrix, but was still disturbing, especially the emaciated corpses that had been fully withdrawn from.

 

In terms of acting, the only truly enjoyable performance was Willem Defoe, who was equal parts father figure and comedic relief, which in its own right was somewhat misplaced in this film.

 

The end scene was a disturbing, yet satisfying wrap to the film, even if it took an awkward route to build up to it.

 

The Bad

 

As I detailed above at length, Daybreakers spent too much time borrowing from other films to fully make its own name. It was sort of a hybrid of Dark City meets Gattaca meets just about every zombie apocalypse film on the market today. With that being said, the flow of the film was equally jumpy, starting slowly and then sort of giving you a cliff notes look at what the rest of the film should have been, making you wonder what got left on the cutting room floor.

 

Hawke’s acting wasn’t horrible, it was just not there. For being the headlining actor, he had minimal lines and very little character development. It was almost as if the director sat there and instructed him to do nothing more and brood in the corner for 2 hours.

 

Overall