Ethan Hawke’s Daybreakers Needs Time To Flesh Out New Ideas

Daybreakers

Directed by Peter Spierig, Michael Spierig

Starring Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill, Claudia Karvan, Michael Dorman

Ethan Hawke is a long way away from Dead Poet’s Society.  At that point, the sky was seemingly the limit for the next big thing.   This has not been any sort of fall from grace.  Instead it’s been a varied and somewhat interesting career, with lows and medium-highs, but by no means the astronomical heights believed by many to be his for the achieving.  This runs through my mind every time I see Hawke in a movie like Assault on Precinct 13, Taking Lives, or Daybreakers.  When I see the exuberant effort he put into Dead Poet’s Society and contrast it with the sleepwalking that I see in the afore-mentioned movies, I ask myself, “Is he bored?”

This shouldn’t be one of the things that pops into your head when watching a movie, but the way he shuffles from scene to scene, plays hapless victim to every group he encounters tells me otherwise.  There is no point in the movie where I think of him as Edward Dalton.  Rather, I think of him as Ethan Hawke, a guy making his living in front of a camera.  This is not his mode in every movie, and he is certainly far from the only person in Hollywood making sub-par movies to finance the stuff he really wants to do.  Difference is, when Paul Newman made a movie, any movie, he was the character through and through.  Is Ethan Hawke a modern version of Paul Newman?  No.  Could he have been?  I think he took a left turn somewhere.  Although he thinks he should have acquired a superb reputation by now,  deep down, he knows that the likes of Newman would never have been seen in Precinct 13.

Watching Daybreakers, it feels like one is watching what amounts to a decent start of a story, but something requiring perhaps two more films to more adequately pursue its own somewhat original ideas.  A vampire movie or an apocalypse movie is not first on my list of must see.  Still, this movie takes the two tired plot lines and merges them into one, giving the finished product more juice.  Only a little more, however.  The ideas at the forefront of the movie eventually, in the name of expedience, succumb to a series of meaningless gory action scenes.

How did this happen?  My guess is that the original presentation included a larger outline.  Many films do, and then they get the Star Wars treatment: if you make enough profit with your first effort, they give you a budget for more.  It is hard to pare down your original idea to all the good ones and leave something for parts 2, 3 and so on.  Unless, of course, you have a series of hit books to fall back on.

So, in a synopsis, we find that vampires now run the world, are tracking down the groups of remaining humans, and looking for a source of synthetic human blood to keep their race alive.  Vamps without enough human blood are turning into some sort of bat-like demon creatures, called subsiders.  Needless to say, subsider is bad for vampire to run across.  Elsewhere in the dark, we have a team of hematologists (led by Hawke and Vince Colosimo) searching for that synthetic.

Enter Audrey and Elvis (Karvan and Dafoe).  They are humans trying to continue the resistance movement, and they have a secret: Elvis was once a vampire, but is human again.  The way it happens is tantamount to taking in small amounts of the sunlight and covering yourself with water, a wet towel…or something.  It was a pretty cool thought, but it almost immediately changed for purposes of moving the plot forward.  The cure takes an even stranger twist at the end.  This was a nice idea on its own, but as the third variation of a cure in 45 minutes, I began to wonder if anything wouldn’t cure these vampires.

Then there is the series of attacks that round out the film.  They vary between V-type, round ups and absolutely grotesque slaughter.  Events seemed so mashed together it mutes the effect of subplots, like lead antagonist Charles Bromley (Neill) and his daughter Alison (Lucas).  If you wonder what happened there, you are not alone.

The movie could have been a good start to a series, but instead becomes a half-human/half-formula mess.

(**1/2 out of *****)