Show Me Your Teeth

Daybreakers

Directed By: Michael & Peter Spierig

Starring: Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, & Sam Neill

Vampires are definitely in style right now, what with True Blood mesmerizing television audiences and The Twilight Saga burning up the box-office. It is no surprise then that some filmmakers would swoop in to take advantage of such success, each hoping to snatch a little piece of the prize. And thus we arrive at Daybreakers, a movie written and directed by the Spierig brothers. Let me start off by saying that these two definitely know how to direct a stylish movie. Daybreakers simply looks phenomenal, with sleek production styles and halfway-decent special effects. Unfortunately, my compliments will, for the most part, end there. Other than that, Daybreakers is fairly awful. You can tell right from the get-go that this movie is only about vampires because, right now, vampires are profitable. Its basic plot, which features a world so overrun by vampires that human blood has become scarce, seems creative at first, until you realize that it is really a one-trick pony, developed as a flimsy facade to make audiences think they will actually be seeing a full-fledged story. Instead, they will actually be sitting through a concept that never fully takes off...though, I must admit, it's a pretty neat concept for the opening act.

Just Watch the Trailer

Armored

Directed By: Nimród Antal

Starring: Matt Dillon, Columbus Short, & Milo Ventimiglia

Trailers can often make or break a movie. You might not think that a two-minute stretch of seconds-long clips taken from a 90-minute movie would be able to harm the finished product, but you would be wrong. Case in point: Armored, a movie that might have been all right had I not seen its trailer in front of nearly every action movie I saw in theaters for the last half of 2009. The trailer, jam-packed with action scenes and big-bang explosives, establishes Armored as a heavy-hitting action thriller, the kind that would have you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end and leave you feeling breathless. That, my friends, is not what this movie is. That is what it tries to be, but it misses the mark so badly that it becomes almost tedious to endure. Every action scene in this movie is included, to some degree, in the trailer; every plot point and every twist are spelled out with painstaking detail in the trailer as well. When the credits rolled, I sat back and compared the movie with the trailer. I realized that both told the same story with the same amount of action, but that the trailer did it in just a few minutes, not just under an hour and a half. I hate to admit that Armored, in many ways, was just completely misguided from the get-go, because I had actually developed high expectations for it. In the end, though, it's a complete disappointment.