Good idea, poorly executed

Rating: 3/10 (24 October 2007)

It's a great concept - vampires who have a month of night to play with. But there are so many things wrong with this film that it's hard to enjoy it.
(Spoilers follow, so if you're going to see it, stop reading here.) The movie is full of plot holes. The first thing we see is a pile of burnt cell phones, and we are supposed to think that the vampires' helper stole all the cell phones in town to keep people from calling for help. Yet not two minutes later we see the two lead characters talking to each other on cell phones. If he missed those, he surely missed others.
The town's electricity goes out early in the film. A few people have generators. But when we go to the utility dome at the end, the lights are on and everything is running merrily. Why? The vampires go on a killing spree at the beginning of the film, for no obvious reason. Can they really eat that much all at once? This leaves a handful of people alive and hiding for the next month - first in an attic, then in a store, then the police station. All the while the vampires are creeping around outside. If they think they've eaten everyone, why are they still there? And if they haven't, why aren't they searching places like the store and the police station? They don't seem to have anything better to do. And why, in the final fight scene, do all the vampires just stand and watch while only one fights? Have they been watching too many martial arts films? And why, at the end, does Josh Hartnett not just go into the basement for a few hours? The film has other problems beside the plot holes. Much of the dialogue seems to come from some big Hackneyed Dialogue Generator. The pacing is jerky. For example, in one shot we see a person running to avoid detection by the vampires, and in the next shot the same person is almost sauntering, with no apparent distress about the possibility of being eaten alive if caught in the open. This happens over and over. And it doesn't help that most of the thirty days of the title are glossed over with screen cards like "Day 7," which is immediately followed by "Day 18," the main difference between the two being that Hartnett has grown a flimsy beard. Hartnett is wrong for the role, anyway. He doesn't have the gravity to carry off playing the take-charge sheriff. You sit wondering why the other people are, for the most part, unquestioningly following his instructions.
Finally there are the vampires themselves, who are hard to take seriously. They're probably supposed to look hip and goth. Instead, they look like they escaped from a mental institution to attend a Marilyn Manson concert. They have distorted eyes and walk around with their mouths hanging open all the time, so we can see their teeth. This gives them a sort of slack-jawed Down's Syndrome appearance. They're not very scary, but you feel guilty laughing at them; it feels like mocking the afflicted.
It's a shame about this movie. It could have been genuinely interesting. Too bad.