Yes, it’s another vampire movie, but as last year’s Let the Right One In proved, there’s still some life in the old bloodsucking genre. Daybreakers starts out well as a vampire noir, complete with a sullen, hat-wearing, cigarette-smoking vampire hero, Edward Dalton (Hawke), shuffling around in the cruddy darkness. It’s 2019, and the vampire population has exploded, leaving very few humans around for food. A corporate sleazeball vampire, Charles Bromley (Neill), harvests humans and sells the blood; he has armies of human-hunters at his command. Dalton also works for Bromley, attempting to invent a blood substitute to keep the vampire population from mutating into hideous creatures. But Dalton inadvertently meets a couple of humans, Audrey (Karvan) and Lionel “Elvis” Cormac (Dafoe), who actually have a cure for vampirism.

The Details

Daybreakers

Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill, Claudia Karvan.

Directed by Michael and Peter Spierig.

Rated R.

Opens Friday.

Beyond the Weekly

Daybreakers

IMDb: Daybreakers

Rotten Tomatoes: Daybreakers

The movie makes a sudden jump from grim shadows to sun-baked flats, souped-up cars and crossbows; in other words, it swaps vampire noir for a violent, urban chase movie. Dafoe’s “Elvis” character, with his trash accent and colorful innuendos (“It’s as safe as barebacking a five-dollar whore”), as well as the tank-top wearing Audrey, changes the mood from stoic to badass. The director brothers Michael and Peter Spierig last appeared with Undead (yes, another zombie movie), an energetic but uninspired mishmash of borrowed ideas. Daybreakers is likewise energetic, and it has more in the way of ideas—including a nifty cautionary tale that makes 2012 look bloated and sad—but the logic that ties them all together can sometimes strain to the point of transparency. It’s fairly easy to blow open some of the plot holes, but it’s also easy to be impressed by things like a special car modified with video cameras so that vampires can drive during the day.

As the movie ramps up toward its chase-and-explosion climax, some of the sequences are as likely to inspire unintentional laughs as thrills. But the good news is that Daybreakers will probably have you by then. It establishes early that anything goes, and it sticks carefully to that credo. If viewers can sink their teeth into that, they’re halfway home.