Daybreakers: Where The Movie Suddenly Falls Off A Cliff.

I saw the trailer for Daybreakers late last year, and along with the smattering of other interesting teasers for 2010 movies, this was a movie that I was willing to take a chance with. Solid casting (Ethan Hawke, Sam Neill, and a redneck-y Willem Dafoe) and a not-so-new plot of a world where vampires are the global population (Humans are hunted so they can spike their vampiric coffee with blood.) should make for an interesting movie.

The first few scenes actually make one sympathize with the bloodsucking, lifeless mother-effers. The movie is visually well thought out, as it drags you in and prevents you from seeing it from a fishbowl. It convinces you that this is still a familiar world, and yet you’ll notice that you’ll be so out of place – it bombards you with detail of a society that has moved on from being once human, and likes it better this way (Would you like some extra blood in your coffee, sir?). Life (or the lack of it – no one has a pulse, or a reflection) goes on.

Except, apparently, for one man. (This is, with all other movies with heroic plots, the golden standard. Somebody always doesn’t get with the program.) Edward (Ethan Hawke’s character) is simpatico to the humans, goes on a blood diet, and works to finding a substitute to human blood before humans are extinct and they are all left sucking on chicken’s necks (which they somehow left out of the story. Somebody needs to explain to me how this vampirism thing works. I might drink cow’s blood or something. Are vampires limited to human blood? I’d be a really lousy vampire. I need more information to make it in that world.)

At some point the movie starts to drag, and I realized that what kept me interested the whole time was the beautiful semi-dystopian world created in the movie.There are surprisingly few action sequences in the movie, and the ones that move the plot along are underwhelming (we’ll get to the final action sequence in another paragraph – undeservingly so.)

The movie had some characters that I felt were misused or understated. A couple of them threw me off – the vampire senator, and the girl who played Sam Neill’s daughter.I felt they could have had more significant roles (after a couple of scenes, the senator was never scene again, contributing nothing.) As for Sam’s daughter, he and Ethan had dialogue about her, setting me up with the expectation that she was going to be an important part of the plot. But when she did appear in her scenes, it was already too late into the movie that she almost felt like a prop. I felt more could have been done with her role. Plus she was the only pretty face in the movie. She did help the movie make an important transition towards the film’s climax, so she did her job.

If Willem Dafoe had just crossbowed Ethan Hawke's character right then, I wouldn't have had to suffer through the movie's ending.

The female protagonist was almost unimportant that she had to be kidnapped towards the end just to make sure that she was still in the movie until it finished. All in all a forgettable female lead. Talk about a damsel in distress – I was distressed every time she was on screen.

The film winds down into a gory mess of vampire cops biting and killing and falling on top of each other, and then just stops. You could almost here the lead character’s thoughts – “Alright, we’ve killed all the bad guys. What the f— do we do now?” It was an unsatisfying and confusing ending, almost as if they literally ran out of bad guys to kill. It was one of the most disappointing movie climaxes I had ever seen. (At least Avatar had a potential iconic line in “I see you.”)

It’s easy for me to say that I was disappointed by the movie. I felt more could have been done with such a unique and intriguing premise. The beautiful depiction of this alternate reality by the talented Spierig brothers plus a few different choices here and there could have really realize the film’s potential. Anything would have been better than Ethan Hawke and company driving off into the sunset… or falling off a cliff.