In the "Daybreakers" future, the vampires have it all worked out. No longer just nocturnal, they now run the show -- day and night. There isn't a "True Blood" Louisiana redneck vampire to be found. Need blood? It's farmed in gigantic dairy styled processing facilities where the few surviving humans are captured and then sucked dry.
But that blood supply is about to run out. For the blood baron (Sam Neill), that's a cause for concern. He has his best man on it, hematologist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke, pale and fanged). Edward will find a blood substitute, something they can bottle like pinot noir. Something that will keep all the vampires from devolving into gnarly, uncivilized wraiths, preying on one another and ease Edward's anti-blood sucking conscience.
"Daybreakers" is a stylish but unavoidably silly sci-fi vampire thriller. German codirectors, the Spierig brothers, dazzle us with the inventiveness of this post-human world. Then Edward stumbles into the human underground (Willem Dafoe, with a crossbow, and Claudia Karvan), survivors holding out against extinction. The movie becomes a too-conventional hunters-hunted "rebels" tale with Hawke stuck listening to human lines like these: "We've been searching for vampires we can trust." And "My friends call me Elvis!"
The best scenes are between Hawke and Neill, who makes their moments together sort of a "Job Interview With the Vampire." But those moments are lost once the standard issue explode-in-sunlight/stake-through-the-heart business revs up. "Daybreakers" reminds us that from "Twilight" to "Underworld," "True Blood" to "The Vampire Diaries," this is one genre where supply has utterly overwhelmed demand.
