The Couch Potato reviews 'Daybreakers' on DVD

I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for high-concept movies. If the premise seems cool, you can bet I'll be checking it out. Of course, sometimes the movie lives up to the hype, but most of the time, it falls short. And sometimes, even then, I still don't care. There are instances when I like a movie for what it's trying to be, rather than what it actually is. 

My favorite example of this phenomenon is the Holiday bomb “Surviving Christmas” with Ben Affleck and James Gandolfini. The movie tanked at the box office, and rightly so, because it was, by all accounts, a poor movie.  And yet, I still liked it because it was something that no one had tried before, a seriously dark comedy about Christmas. The attempt scored points for me.

Such is also the case with “Daybreakers,” starring Ethan Hawke, Sam Neil, and Willem Dafoe. The movie has deep flaws in the storytelling, the acting, and the execution that would have killed it for me, were it not for the extremely cool premise.

The world's population has succumbed to an “outbreak,” and most of the people are vampires. Society has adjusted to this, and now the remaining non-vamp humans are not second-class citizens, but actually rounded up and harvested to maintain the blood supply that is vital; for the vampires' survival.

Ethan Hawke is a hematologist who has spent much of his vampire-life trying to come up with a blood substitute, because the dwindling human population means less blood for the vampire population. Without the blood, the vampires turn into ugly, feral creatures incapable of civilized life.

Of course, there's a rag-tag band of humans left, avoiding detection and, as it happens, holding the “cure,” a way for the vampires to return to human status. Can they survive long enough to compel the sympathetic vampires to accept the cure before time runs out, for both the humans and the vampires?

All very cool considerations. Plenty of room for exploring all kinds of issues with this paradigm; racism with Nazi-Germany overtones, corporate greed, the class system, government control over the population, eugenics, the possibilities abound. And this is precisely where the movie fails, in my opinion.

All these topics are touched on in the most cursory way possible, as if the filmmakers were more concerned about showing off the fact that they brought up the subjects than they were about actually exploring them in any depth whatsoever. They use cliches as subsititutes for insight so they can touch on as many broad subjects as possible in a seemingly desparate attempt to seem relevant.

Despite all that, I still like the movie, as stated before, for what it's trying to be. It's a disitinct possibility the reason I'm willing to overlook the films flaws is because I'm tired of seeing what are essentially Harlequin romances with vampires do so well at the box office. It takes little imagination to take standard romance plots and stick vampires in them.

Despite the many “a-swing-and-a-miss” problems in “Daybreakers,” it is, at least, an attempt at originality, and that scores major points with me.

Article written by Dave Fogerson