Sometimes the wrong people make the right movie.  I've complained before about missed opportunities and great ideas that don't get executed quite as well as they could be.  Daybreakers was a terrific, fun movie but it was a little frustrating because it could have been a great one.  The central premise if fantastic.  The vampires have won, they've taken over the world and they've either turned or hunted the human population down to a trickle.  While they don't rely only on human blood (they can apparently live off of animal blood,) they appear to prefer the good stuff, so there's an industry of human blood farming that rounds up remaining humans and hooks them up to a giant apparatus that drains them slowly.  The film kicks off with a reluctant vampire hematologist who's trying to find a cure for vampirism or at least a substitute for human blood.

All of that stuff works great on a conceptual level and the directors have clearly thought this all through.  They've designed a world that makes sense and it feels like a natural evolution of our society, just modified to suit people who can't walk in the daylight.  The movie is well-designed and it makes the most of its seemingly limited budget.  A lot of the film has that slightly fuzzy 300 or Sky Captain look where the backgrounds are entirely created with CGI and blended into the foreground with a soft focus.  They compose memorable shots, dress the characters appropriately, throw in classic vampire iconography, and generally tell a story that I want to see more of.

But the film isn't a complete success because the script feels like a draft.  The characters are all there and the plot moves along just fine, but the dialog gets awfully stiff and corny at times.  Characters tend to state the obvious, or they have quirks that sound good in a treatment but don't really work without the right words on the page or direction behind the camera.  There are a couple of convenient ways out of situations that I wish were dealt with a little more smartly--when your hero is saved at the last moment by someone who hasn't even appeared in the scene until he's needed, it's just lazy writing.  Aside from the script, the music is pretty underwhelming and at times downright ugly.  The movie also employs a few too many loud jump scares when it could rely just on the creepy dread that is inherent in the story.

None of the film's shortcomings kill its momentum entirely, but they keep it from being a classic.  It's technically competent, exceptionally well designed and thought out, and it has the makings of a truly great metaphorical tale about class and race and greed, but it never really makes the most of all of that.  I'd gladly line up for a sequel, but I hope that the directors can find someone to hone the script so that it matches the creativity of their ideas.