Daybreakers Dim, But It's No Twilight

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."