Film

Hyped at Toronto’s Midnight Madness sidebar as the next frontier in vampire movies, Daybreakers feels only slightly less anemic than an Underworld sequel. This Australian-produced horror film boasts exactly one intriguing idea: It takes place in a future world where vampires outnumber humans, which means the food supply is shrinking, fast. In the kind of speculative sci-fi invention that Daybreakers could have used more of, we watch as vampire commuters at a coffee cart complain about the diluted blood in their Styrofoam cups.

On the verge of developing a kind of synthetic blood, a vampire hematologist (Hawke) winds up in an unlikely alliance with a rogue band of humans, who may have found an antidote to vampirism. (Dafoe, crossbow in hand, appears in his most blatant paycheck role since Speed 2.) With a set of supernatural ground rules that only a screenwriter could love, they take on the vampire overclass, ruled by an arch and self-amused CEO (Sam Neill). If most of this seems familiar, that’s because the best elements have been covered in more exciting movies: The vampire camaraderie and reverse-conversion themes echo those in Kathryn Bigelow’s magisterial Near Dark (1987), and the corporate satire feels like a pale shadow of that in George Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005). Long before the end credits rise, Daybreakers has exhausted its novelty.