Playlist: Daybreakers

Ethan Hawke has now made it to another edition of Playlist. First it was Staten Island...and now a fascinating concept of a poorly executed Vampire flick in Daybreakers. I like Ethan Hawke. I feel like he has been the poor mans, B level version of Brad Pitt or something. This guy has more acting talent then most A list actors...is sexy as hell and can really sell a scene with his eyes...in this case his eyes are blood red. But he must have debts, or a crack problem, cause he is always in these crazy kinds of films now. I looked at his filmography and swore that I had seen a lot of his films...guess I was wrong...I came up with Gattaca, Training Day and The Explorers. These are the standouts.

As for the film itself. It suffers from what I said in an earlier post about films with great concepts and poor execution, you know like Highlander, Superman Returns, etc...This film's concept is that Vampires have spread through Earth as a disease and they are harvesting humans for the blood. Our hero is Ethan Hawke, a scientist who refuses to drink pure human blood and we never find out why...the edits in this film leave out all that we want to learn about this world, which is done real well (with the exception of a few scenes when slowed down with blu-ray DVD technology exposes the poor cgi work), the action takes over and we are left with a good plan but no direction.

Our heroes, which include Willhem Defoe (Jesus), take off to find a cure and do find one, which is a pretty cool idea in the history of Vampire legend (I will not spoil it), but the pic above gives you an idea. There are side stories that don't need to be here, and it plays with your emotions and tells us way too much detail, making the film feel like it doesn't trust the audience and needs to flat out tell us everything, down to the car that Dafoe drives...its a Trans-Am, with the words "From the ashes to the fire" or some crap that is supposed to make us connect the cure with the phoenix on the car to his own personnel vampire experience...but it's all too much.

If you like anti-twilight vampire films...like Let the Right One In (which is a far superior film to this..and has much less cgi and does a better job with the story and trusting the audience)...or even the old Near Dark (with Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow as director)...I say watch it and see for yourself...but be warned there is a lot of vampire gorging on human flesh...not so much sucking blood as ravaging in blood lust.

BOOM