The Freak's Rating: D- : Whenever a new vampire flick comes out, Nate is my go to guy (see review below). Nate and I both appreciate the horror genre, especially when a film shows promise in the preview to be a good one (insert joke here). Daybreakers had originality in its favor from the tipoff, but fails to capitalize...miserably.
Ethan Hawke once had promise as an actor, hitting a peak with Training Day that made the world stand up and take notice of his talent. In Daybreakers, Hawke shows he has bottomed out. His delivery is laughable. That said, the writing he was working with was ridiculous in nearly every sense of the word. Willem Defoe goes from an Academy Award winner for Platoon to a vampire turned human? Who is this man's agent and why is he still working in the business.
The real tragedy is that there was promise here for a great film. Taking an interesting angle on vampires and their rule of the earth left me curious where they could take the story. Now, having seen where it went I'm wondering why I ever gave it that much credit. There is one truly interesting scene here where vampires fight a vampire. At that point I gave the film a chance, then it completely destroyed every spec of promise.
Reality went completely out the window as characters who fought their entire lives to get family members back discarded them moments afterward. The biggest question I had after truly digesting the film was, why? If the "resistence" had any type of media (radio, television, etc...), they would have known the blood supply was running dry and that soon the vampires would die off. Why didn't they just hold up somewhere with a bunch of canned food? They would have ruled the planet once again after about 30 days. That is the least of the problems I have with the film. It turns to complete trash in the final 20 minutes and resorts to a typical nonsensical bloodbath. Bad job all around by all key players here.
Nate's Rating: D : It started out with an interesting premise that you can see in the previews, but it took a few missteps early on and then went downhill from there. Kind of like watching a drunken old man slowly fall down a slanted sidewalk over the course of 98 minutes. Which would almost be entertaining, except that you paid to see a gymnast. Not an Olympic gymnast or anything; just a normal, local, gymnast that you went to see more to give them moral support than anything. And you got the drunk instead.
It's almost so bad it's good, but not quite. It's just very bland. The filmmakers establish in the opening credits that anytime there are 3-5 seconds of silence, something will jump out at you. And they do that about once every 10 seconds. Before you're halfway through the movie, you stop even flinching at those moments because they're so obvious.
I might have had my hopes a little too high when I heard that Ethan Hawke and William Defoe and that guy from Jurassic Park were in it. And while the acting all around is acceptable, it's certainly not memorable. I had the feeling someone needed some quick cash and agreed to do the film as a favor.
The special effects were noticably flawed in a few shots, which kind of made sense given the mediocrity of everything else in the movie. Predictable scenes are only broken up by unnecessary ones and slow motion shots are used clumsily to try to generate some kind of emotional response. Note to filmmakers: Don't use slo-mo when half of your actors are just looking silly.
There were a few good parts, though. Without spoiling it too much, the scene where Ethan Hawke undergoes a special treatment was interesting (but I did wonder why the electrodes didn't melt off his body), even though you knew what was going to happen. And some (too few, but some) aspects of the vampire-run society were interesting. It's there that the movie missed it's best potential, in my opinion. The vampire society was about 95% the same as human society. They could have done some really cool things with that, but they didn't.
I guess the filmmakers' biggest failing was that I felt they wanted me to be experiencing some kind of dramatic emotion -- either sympathy for the vampires or disgust at them -- but nothing ever materialized. It's like a shock and gore flick that thinks it's a social commentary, but is way too young and immature to bring its message across.
