After establishing a very interesting world, Daybreakers ultimately falls short with poor action scenes and Dafoe’s cringe worthy performance as “Elvis”

The best way to express how I feel about this movie, with all its unused potential and occasional moments of brilliance is the opening scene: A young girl, unwilling to live a life as an immortal vampire any longer, ends her life by waiting for the sunset. As the sun started to rise you hear her screams for a few seconds while the camera was still looking at only the house. I was excited to (not) see this death, hoping the rest of the movie would use action in a subtle manner… but then it happened. A cut straight to the burning girl, in all her horrible CG glory.

This process of giving you hope only to crush it repeats itself many times. The introduction to the vampire world was well done; snippets of news broadcasts in between dark, stylized, dialogue free shots of the city. little things like Hawke’s character not appearing in the mirror, or the homeless vampires with blood donation signs around their necks made me have hope once again, but then the characters started talking…

the plot is basically standard fare from then on, and I would have been fine with that if it weren’t for 2 things

1) Willem Dafoe
2) His cure

Dafoe is easily one of my favorite actors. His presence alone can turn junk like the Boondock Saints into relatively decent movies. When I heard that Dafoe was involved with Daybreakers, I could just imagine him playing an ancient Vampire or just being a relatively badass dude. What we got instead was some vaguely accented, redneck, car loving, former vampire who goes by the name of “Elvis”.

His already ridiculous character is given major importance when he reveals he was once a vampire, but was cured by the most ridiculous accident that makes me wonder if at this point in the story the screenwriter just said “fuck it” and wrote whatever nonsense came to his head.

It seems that the Spierig brothers took turns in filming Daybreakers, as the action scenes and the more stylistic aspects of the movie clashed so heavily as if they belonged to different films. Some parts feel like the great ‘Let the right one in’, but in the end Daybreakers ended up a subpar ‘Underworld’ (minus the Beckinsale <33333)