Day Breakers

I hate to say it, but this was another attempt to cash in on the Vampire Craze stirred up by all the Twilight stuff.  Not only does this try to borrow from the hype of the Twilght stuff, its plot is a mix between 2 other films: "The Omega Man" (1971 with Charlton Heston-which was remade in 2007 with Will Smith's "I am Legend") and another Charlton Heston film in 1973 called "Soylent Green" as the food supply is running out.  Nutshell, vampires rule the world and farm humans for their blood.  Reminiscent of tapping maple trees in Maine for their sap to make maple syrup, Sam Neill (Jurassic Park) runs a plant that taps confined humans for their blood to feed the ever growing vampire population.  I snicker in that should the same people who rail against KFC for growing chickens that never touch the ground were around in this film, they would hopefully be doing the same for the humans whose feet never touch the ground either. 

The issue is that the blood supply is running out and Ethan Hawke (Gattaca, White Fang, Alive) has to develop an alternative food source to feed the masses.  He is against the hunting, confining, and harvesting of humans and when he runs across a band of humans, he seeks to protect them and in the process runs into Willem Dafoe (Spiderman, The Last Temptation of Christ, a few butt drippy mid-century British Romances) who has stumbled on a cure for vampirism and an ability to return from vampire to human.  The deal is, can Hawke and Dafoe get their cure to the vampires before all humans are killed off? Oh my!

As soon as the movie started, I was given a choice of version to watch at the movie's beginning: Human or Vampire and this clued me that major amounts of cheese were on their way for the rest of the film.  For all I know, this may have been some trackable test the CIA put in so I chose Human to stay above possible suspicion.  The overall plot is a familiar one in which the lone voice in wilderness is seen as a Benedict Arnold by his people/vampires.  Of course he is the sane one and he must battle impossible odds to lead the overwhelming majority to his way of thinking.  This plot line, as mentioned before, uses the vampire craze to get what it can in the way of an audience.  In essence, it is like the plasma compared to Twilight's real blood. 

Neill, Dafoe, and Hawke are great actors (though Dafoe does seem a bit over the top) and without them, lesser actors would have caused the movie's early return to the red envelope.  I wonder though, all of these actors were in awesome films a while back...what happened?  They are now in films that don't even seem to make to the big screen but that go straight to DVD.  Oh well.  Okay, so the acting is good by those 3 and a few others, the directing is good as well as it does not detract from the movie.  The script; nothing really noteworthy so it is fine.  On the cinematography, it was all okay too.

If you are at the end of movies you want to see and ready for just about anything until new releases hit the queue, this will do, but it is not a first string movie to see.