No fashion-conscious multiplex movie seems to face opening day without some grave issue of our day propped in its buttonhole. Daybreakers dials up resource scarcity, class conflict, the military-industrial complex, and big pharma. (Actual line: "It was never about a cure. It's about repeat business.") The rationed near future of Daybreakers recalls Soylent Green, except everyone knows they're eating people because almost everyone is a vampire in 2019, the result of a vampire plague, after which Daybreakers opens. Unrest grows as drinkable blood from living humans, which is now factory-farmed, runs out. Ethan Hawke plays a hesitant blood sipper, a hematologist looking for a synthetic substitute. Sam Neill is hambone-wicked as a vulpine CEO. But wearisome "Ain't it cool?" videogame-splatter violence is all that's memorable of the action, while a (mixed) metaphorical subtext of conservationism can't save a text that squanders its actors.
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