Daybreakers 
 
 'Daybeakers': It's draining men in latest vampire flick 
 
 Handout Ethan Hawke, Claudia Karvan, Willem Dafoe in 'Daybreakers,' the lastest take on the booming vampire genre. 
 
 The fact that "Daybreakers" was filmed over two years ago can't detract from one haunting revelation: This action-horror thriller's depiction of a world lousy with vampires has come true — at least in pop culture. 
 
 Writer-directors Michael and Peter Spierig couldn't have predicted a TV/movie landscape thirsting for twilight romances and true blood. 
 
 But there are twists here, and while inspiration eventually runs dry, "Daybreakers" does add vamp-mobiles to the usual mythology. 
 
 Those are the anti-sunlight cars the undead drive in 2019, 10 years after a plague gives almost everyone red eyes and a fear of wooden stakes. There's also a ghoul military force and baristas serving blood-spiked coffee, except the hemo­globin drained from hunted humans is running low. 
 
 That's where vamp hematologist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) comes in with his Van Helsing trench coat. Edward hates his supernatural diet and is working on an ineffective blood substitute for his evil boss (Sam Neill), since "infected" blood turns vamps into man-bats. 
 
 Edward finds a group of renegade humans led by sexy Audrey (Claudia Karvan) and raspy-voiced Elvis (Willem Dafoe), crossbow-wielding saviors with a cure, and Edward defangs himself for the greater good. 
 
 Despite the Spierig brothers' punchy visual style and satiric tone, "Daybreakers" eventually devolves, though Dafoe and his Southern drawl goose things up and Hawke has a greasy romanticism. 
 
 (It remains unclear if Edward Dalton would win a brood-off against "Twilight's" ­Edward Cullen.) 
 
 But all the mirror-world bits get tiresome, and the Spierigs seem to lose interest in what they've created, a feeling that's infectious. In a vampire movie, that's truly the deadliest thing imaginable. 
 
 jneumaier@nydailynews.com ||||| After all the toothless, limp-dick vampire posturing in the Twilight chick flicks, it's a kick to see a balls-out, R-rated movie about bloodsuckers that doesn't spare the gore so little girls won't cry into their Twitpics of Rob Pattinson. Such a movie is Daybreakers, a nifty genre piece from Aussie twins Michael and Peter Spierig (Undead) who put some oomph into an overworked theme. Don't get me wrong. Daybreakers, despite the star presence of Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe, is a B movie, with all the disreputable low rent, lowbrow pleasures that implies. I'll take that over pompous any day. 
 
 Peter Travers reviews Daybreakers in his weekly video podcast, "At the Movies With Peter Travers." 
 
 As the Spierigs see the future — it's 2019 — vampires have taken over the world. Hilariously, they're all a bunch of tie-and-suited corporate workslaves who commute at night and appreciate Starbucks for adding a few shots of blood to their daily caffeine fix. The plot coagulates when bossman Charles Bromley (Sam Neill) puts pressure on his employees to come up with a blood substitute (what, he's never heard of Tru Blood?). Enter the hero of the piece, a vampire named Edward (aren't they all?). This Edward, played with style and bruised grace by Hawke, is a hematologist with such a sympathy for humans that he's also switched to drinking animal blood. When he meets Elvis (Willem Dafoe having a blast), a vampire who has managed — I'll never tell how — to become human again, Edward believes he's found a cure. 
 
 Get more news, reviews and interviews from Peter Travers on The Travers Take. 
 
 But is he too late? The shortage of blood (read: oil or any metaphor you like) has resulted in mass panic. The havenots of this new society, called subsiders, have begun feeding on themselves and morphing into scary bat-like creatures. The script has holes big enough to fall through, but as Bromley sniffs a glass of real human blood like the finest Shiraz — he likes the scent of fear in the nose — or Elvis hums a few bars of the King's immortal "Burning Love" before lifting his crossbow in battle, Daybreakers brims over with fierce retro fun. Highbrows will condescend to this movie like nobody's business. But there are a few of us left out there — junkies for smart exploitation — who will relish this stuff. You know who you are. ||||| In the unnamed metropolis of Daybreakers, downtown bustles at midnight but lies quiet at noon. Sunlight is a little harsh on its denizens, who seem kind of on edge anyway, and not just because of their yellow eyes and pointy teeth. Ten years into an outbreak of vampirism, society has become a dark mirror of what it was before, with one looming problem: The blood farms have started to run dry. The coffee stands have signs boasting “Still Serving 20% Blood.” But it looks like the signs will soon have to come down. What’s a hungry vampire supposed to do? 
 
 Even more confounding, what’s a vampire with a conscience supposed to do? Ethan Hawke plays one such tortured creature, a hematologist turned bloodsucker against his will, now working to create a blood substitute for a many-tentacled corporation led by Sam Neill, an executive whose concern for the future never stretches past the edges of his profit margins. The work, to put it mildly, isn’t going well, and the consequences of failure surround the city in the form of “subsiders,” the feral, violent creatures into which vampires evolve without blood. (Think Max Schreck in Nosferatu, only less dapper.) After one particularly trying day, Hawke runs into the human resistance, an encounter that makes his loyalties even less sure. 
 
 Written and directed with considerable visual flair by Australian siblings Peter and Michael Spierig (Undead), Daybreakers bursts with clever ideas and resonant concepts, from the tiny video camera in Hawke’s car that allows him to see himself without a mirror to the eerie parallels between their world of diminishing resources and ours, which comes complete with a neglected underclass of our own. It begins well, too, balancing the black comedy of the vampire world with some unsettling, well-staged thrills. But after a while, Daybreakers settles into the lulling rhythms of too many horror movies, as the characters ponder what to do in darkened rooms instead of doing much of anything. As the action diminishes, the plot digs into a rut, hobbling toward a climactic showdown that doesn’t feel all that climactic. The Spierigs get a lot of points for inventiveness, but their cleverly constructed, uncomfortably familiar world makes a deeper impression than much of what happens within it. ||||| Vampires are popping up so often these days, and in such a trendy sympathetic light, that it's getting hard to remember when they were the vicious and spooky ''other.'' You could argue that Daybreakers takes the new commonality of vampires to its logical extreme. The movie is set in 2019, 10 years after vampires have taken over the earth and established an undead society that looks a lot like the human one they wiped out. Yes, they've still got big incisors and golden eyes, but they also stand on subway platforms in Willy Loman overcoats, waiting glumly for the next train, and in line at fast-food outlets that serve coffee and ''20 percent'' blood. That would be human blood, and the reason for the scant percentage figure is that the world is fast running out of it. (It's a thin metaphor for our situation with oil.) 
 
 Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke), a vampire hematologist, works for a corporation that farms the blood of human cattle, who hang naked and unconscious with syringes holstered into their necks. Portrayed by Hawke as a sulky silent renegade, Edward lives in a cobalt blue modernist apartment that looks like it could be the vampire version of Mickey Rourke's lair in 9 1/2 Weeks (talk about crypts!). He is working on a plan to create synthetic blood, a crusade that would rescue the vampire world (and save a few humans, too). The only thing that stands in the way is  you guessed it  bloodsucking corporate greed. The sibling writer-director team of Michael and Peter Spierig gather the promising elements of a socio-satirical horror movie. But when Edward joins a roving band of human renegades, led by Willem Dafoe as a guy named Elvis, Daybreakers turns into a ponderous apocalyptic chase film  it's like Children of Men with exploding-plasma shock effects. The best thing you can say about the movie is that it pours some very old blood into a new plastic bottle. C 
 
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– Critics agree that Daybreakers is visually inventive, but the B-movie charms of this vampire/oil allegory don't snare everyone. Some opinions: Willem Dafoe "and his Southern drawl goose things up," Joe Neumaier writes for the New York Daily News, and Ethan Hawke "has a greasy romanticism." But directors the Spierig brothers "seem to lose interest in what they've created, a feeling that's infectious." The film "bursts with clever ideas and resonant concepts," Keith Phipps writes at the Onion AV Club. But the "plot digs into a rut," and the "cleverly constructed, uncomfortably familiar world makes a deeper impression than much of what happens within it." "After all the toothless, limp-dick vampire posturing in the Twilight chick flicks, it's a kick to see a balls-out, R-rated movie about bloodsuckers that doesn't spare the gore so little girls won't cry into their Twitpics of Rob Pattinson," Peter Travers writes in Rolling Stone. Yeah, it's a B movie. "I'll take that over pompous any day." The "thin metaphor for our situation with oil" has "promising elements of a socio-satirical horror movie," Owen Gleiberman writes in Entertainment Weekly. But it devolves into a "ponderous apocalyptic chase film," like "Children of Men with exploding-plasma shock effects."