"Daybreakers" takes place in 2019 when vampires run the world.

The only lesson to take away from Ethan Hawke's horror-action tale "Daybreakers" is vampires cannot run the world's affairs any better than we tasty humans can.

Set in 2019, "Daybreakers" is much like our world of today: Panhandlers begging for scraps, busy bees lining up for a morning rush-hour coffee jolt, precious resources dwindling and global calamity looming, corporate fleecers hoarding the best for themselves.

The differences are the panhandlers are begging for blood, morning rush-hour comes at dusk, hemoglobin is the key coffee fix instead of caffeine and the catastrophe in the making isn't climate change. It's the extinction of humanity, which means starvation for a society of vampires that's now at the top of the food chain.

The second movie from sibling writer-directors Peter and Michael Spierig, who cut their feature teeth on the zombie romp "Undead," "Daybreakers" is another in a seemingly endless series of aren't-we-clever resurrections of the vampire genre.

There are more revisionist bloodsucker stories out there than you can shake a stake at nowadays, and they're getting tiresome.

The Spierigs lay out a hazy back story about how most of the world's population was transformed into vampires a decade earlier.

OK, whatever. Vampires are hip, so apparently you don't have to explain yourselves much to get your movie made.

Hawke stars as Edward Dalton, a bloodsucker who doesn't want to feed on humans, the noble, reluctant vampire sort that's becoming a stereotype, and he's a researcher for a vampire corporation racing to develop a substitute for human blood, which is running out.

He falls in with a pack of humans that has found a way to change vampires back to friendly mortals. The gang is led by Claudia Karvan and Willem Dafoe, who has a real taste for vampire gigs, having starred in "Shadow of the Vampire" and appeared in last fall's "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant."

The story pits Dalton against his evil boss (Sam Neill), who likes the rapacious vampire lifestyle and wants to maintain the status quo of this ultimate consumer culture.

Whatever commentary the Spierigs' intended on our own times is so empty they shouldn't have bothered. And you have to wonder why the actors bothered, too. The humdrum story is beneath them, and the ill-defined characters are stuck muttering rubbish.

The look of the film might be cool if its icy gray color palette hadn't been done much better in "The Matrix" or its retro 1930s fashions didn't look like "Blade Runner" hand-me-downs.

Besides being overly derivative, "Daybreakers" already is a bit dated, citing the vampire outbreak that began in 2009. A lot went wrong last year, but at least we made it through 2009 without growing fangs.

TITLE: “Daybreakers”CAST: Ethan Hawke, Sam Neill, Claudia Karvan, Willem DafoeDIRECTORS: Michael and Peter SpierigRATED: R for strong bloody violence, language and brief nudityGRADE: * * (out of 5)