Wednesday, April 28, 2010

The Case for Vamping the Day

First off, a big thanks to 3 News, who, by their unrelenting Justin Beiber coverage on their six o'clock bulletin and the non stop screaming that provided the ear-bleeding sound track, reminded me how little I am missing by not watching them every night. I feel more enlightened already.

Okay, so I new Daybreakers was going to be fairly naff. But the premise was interesting, in a very counter-Trublood kind of way: what if Vampires were the majority, humans were an endangered species, and there was no blood substitute to feed the undead masses?

It starts off quite atmospheric and intriguing in a very I Am Legend way, with Ethan Hawke starring as a reluctant vampire working to solve world hunger, and Sam Neill as his evil vampiric corporate overlord/boss (not sure if you can have a good vampiric corporate overlord/boss really, or part thereof, but that is a philosophical discussion I will not enter into here). Then Ethan runs into a group of free humans (literally), and a new solution presents itself.

And then the whole film hits the skids and it degenerates into complete nonsense. It was always going to head that way: the liberal amounts of gore exploding everywhere and the overwhelming and highly irritating soundtrack hinted that the film had a core of complete (if bloody) cheese, and that is exposed as soon as Willem Dafoe shows up, trying on the dentures of professional scenery chewer Michael Ironside but finding them a little big even for his mouth. It's like the writer of the first part of the film was staked through the heart, and was replaced by someone dedicated to highlighting Claudia Karvan's nipple-age and dismissing vampire society as completely moronic, unable to use either satellites or common sense to track down pesky (yet also fairly stupid) humans, and whose idea of home security is to have a computer pleasantly announce whenever an outside door is mysteriously opened rather than actually just locking the thing.

The whole film feels very Australian (unsurprisingly), with the scenery and a multitude of ex-Home and Away actors, who have varying degrees of success with their American accents, making it all feel very much like a supernatural R16 episode of The Lost Islands. Most of the actors do well considering the hokum that they are given (Jay Lagaia's fate is deserved, methinks), though the whole thing ends on a "so now what?" note, though hopefully this is not a question that will be answered by a sequel.

Verdict: With lots of cheap shocks and a few thousand litres of fake blood, Daybreakers sinks its teeth into the popular Vampire craze and comes up with a different spin on the theme between its teeth, then promptly spits that out and goes back for wild and stupid sloppy seconds. Enough with the tortured metaphor: 5.5 pints out of 10.

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