TIFF Review: Daybreakers

Daybreakers

OPENING: 01/08/2010

STUDIO: Lionsgate

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
Vampires that don’t sparkle! Hooray!

Opening Statement
Daybreakers stretches a modest budget to impressive lengths, creating a dystopic and gritty future where the world is overtaken by vampires, who are absolutely not interested in dating high school girls. Well, maybe to tear their limbs off. The plot and acting derail themselves faster than a freight train, but it’s refreshing to see a vampire movie get back to the basics of blood and guts.

Facts of the Case
In the year 2019, the world is a very different place. Vampire outbreaks have decimated the human population, who live on the fringes of society, hunted for their blood. The world continues as normal, but now the vast majority of the humans are vampires. Ten years into the new vampire world, the human population has been hunted to verge of extinction, and the vampire population simply cannot survive on the current supply of blood.

Edward (Ethan Hawke) works as a hematologist for a multinational vampire corporation that controls the blood supply for the planet, with walls of hapless individuals strapped to machines constantly pumping out their blood. Recognizing the fragile state of their own existence, Edward and his team search for an artificial substitute to satiate the masses, but all their efforts have disastrous (and messy) results. His boss, Charles (Sam Neill) urges him on, anxious to find a new market to capitalize on. For Ethan, he finds his work necessary to save the human species. Despite his own vampire nature, he finds himself feeling sorry for the humans, avoiding human blood at all costs.

Through a series of accidental events, Edward comes in contact with a small resistance group of humans harboring an earth-shattering secret. Their leader Elvis (Willem Dafoe) asks Edward to help them on a different approach to the vampire food problem: a cure for vampirism. As the vampire population starves slowly, blood riots break out and threaten to tear society apart, and Edward thinks he has a chance to save his world. But his corporation may not want a cure…

The Evidence
Directed by the Spierig brothers (Peter and Michael), who rose in the Lionsgate ranks after their low-budget Aussie zombie film Undead cleaned up with cult fans, Daybreakers is a serious upgrade from their previous work. During the Q&A at the screening, one of the brothers remarks that the entire budget of Undead was overtaken by the contact lens budget in Daybreakers. With an influx of cash and a surprisingly all-star cast, the duo spent the last few years perfecting the film, which lands a release date just as the world is finally getting tired of vampire pop culture. Don’t mention this to the Sperigs. They swear they started to work on this long before vampires were “cool” and “sparkly”. You won’t be seeing any romance in this movie, trust me.

Imagine the world of Gattaca if overrun by vampires, and you have a pretty good visual image of Daybreakers. The film makes great use of CGI and artistic design to create a dystopic world a mere ten years in the future where vampires are now the dominant species on the planet. People still go to work, live in nice houses, order coffee (20% blood) and take the subway, but they’re vampires. Life moves on. The movie is crammed full of newspaper articles, television news reports and sly technological working solutions to how a vampire manages to live a day-to-day existence, like cars that have special tinting that allows them to drive (via cameras) during the day, and a PA system in every neighborhood giving advanced notice of the exact time of sunrise. These geek-out moments are everywhere, and the nerds among us will delight in seeing all the attention that went into them.

As the film progresses, we learn of the human resistance movement; a loose rag-tag army constantly on the run from vampire hunters looking to farm their bodies for the growing demand for blood. It isn’t a David vs. Goliath situation, more like mice constantly scurrying and cowering from the army of cats on their heels. Edward, being sympathetic to the human cause, finds himself accidentally aligned with a group of on-the-run humans, who hope that his hematologist skills can aid them in finding a cure for the vampire condition. The logic behind the solution devised is questionable at best, drunken at worst, but it’s a moot point anyway, because Daybreakers is the kind of film that if you think too long about its premise, or its scientific explanations, blood will shoot out your nose. Don’t do it. Resist the temptation.

A fun horror film full of carnage, shocks and some great “boo” moments that will get audiences screaming, the experience of Daybreakers is easily ruined by the unauthorized use of brain cells to ask questions about the acting quality (horrible by any measurable standard) or the plot (riddled with puncture holes large enough to drive a car into) or the scientific justifications for the events on screen. Don’t ask why the cars are all current-models with glowing blue grills, or what logic dictates how vampires can go out in daylight sometimes, but catch on fire other times, or how you can cure somebody of vampirism via the method explained in the film (a genuine brain-killer), or why when you shoot a vampire with a crossbow they explode lie a canister of gasoline. Actually, I know the answer to the last one: because it’s @#$% cool. I think a lot of decisions in the conceptual drawing up of Daybreakers were answered this way.

Take for example the casting: Sam Neill as the primary villain figure, an expensive-suited vampire CEO plays his role with such over-the-top sneering contempt that you can hear the vitriol dripping from his tongue. He isn’t scary or menacing, just goofy. And speaking of goofy, Willem Dafoe, whose purpose in the film is so bizarre as to represent the single greatest casting decision ever in the history of the world. His name is Elvis, and he drives muscle cars, and he kind of affects a southern accent, but only on 25% of the words he speaks—the rest, Dafoe forgets about it. Every bit of dialogue is a hackneyed one-liner, every conversation an atomic bomb of logical fallacy. It is as if the Iraqi propaganda ministry wrote the dialogue for Dafoe’s character, piecing it together from every B-reel John Wayne film and archival episodes of Hee Haw. A performance this over-the-top stupid could tear a lesser movie in half, but Daybreakers feeds off it, channels it, turns it into an ironic “so bad it’s good” extravaganza you can’t help but laugh at. Ethan Hawke plays his Edward character as a wussy human sympathizer, cowardly and sniveling, but his performance is satisfactory—he doesn’t really have a chance at outperforming his two senior cast members, because they’re just so over-the-top bizarre.

All told, Daybreakers is a triumph of low-budget excess, pulling off complex sequences and spectacular gore with minimal financing. It looks great, sounds great and will entertain on a pure aesthetic and visceral sense, provided you avoid thinking about it too much. The blood and bullets fly, vampires and humans explode in equal numbers, and the dystopic world comes crashing down with glorious chaotic fury. No one is going to give the Sperig brothers an award for “Screenplay That Makes The Most Sense”, but the two have talent for the action and horror genres that will no doubt take them far in Hollywood.

A random observation: the score is a massive orchestral affair, sweeping and epic and grandiose, and feels mismatched to the grey-tinted fluorescent light themed future full of vampires. A score more low-key and gloomy would suit the subject matter better.

Closing Statement
Daybreakers emerges into the light of day with buckets of blood, frenetic vampire action and much style. The premise is a refreshing twist on an increasingly clichéd subject matter. If all you expect from your action/horror hybrids are slick one-liners, buckets of blood and hewn limbs, Daybreakers will deliver. The story and acting are laughably bad, so check your sensibility and logic at the door.

The Verdict
7/10

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