Movie Review: 30 Days of Night

I was pretty psyched to see this when the trailers first started appearing last year. The visuals looked great, the premise was cool, the vampires looked kinda different and scary, even the cast was alright (years after Pearl Harbor and his brief teen movie stardom, Josh Hartnett isn't so bad, plus he was balanced out by folks like Danny Huston and the schlubby looking guy who always shows up in Chris Nolan movies (Mark Boone Junior)). Director David Slade's previous movie, Hard Candy was tense and interesting, though hurt badly by a pretty terrible third act.
Anyway, 30 Days of Night turned out to be pretty bad. In fact, for a movie that looked like a possible classic in the making, or at the very least an above average genre picture, it was pretty damn disappointing.
For one thing, as good as the premise is (vampires without the safety net of the sun rising, basically), nobody seemed to have much idea what to do with it. The premise demands something of a seige movie, where the characters can't wait the vampires out a few hours, so they must resort to other means of survival. But the movie completely fails in this regard. As some other reviews have pointed out, the time we see pass in the movie doesn't feel like 30 days-- it barely feels like more than a particularly rough night. The characters simply hide for a few minutes (several days in the movie's time), then arbitrarily go someplace else to hide, and engage in a brief action scene. This repeats several times, then the movie ends.
Nothing in the movie makes much sense. I still don't know why the vampires offed their Renfield-esque errand boy (I guess because methody weirdo Ben Foster was needed to do another wholly inappropiate and inexplicable crazy accent for some other movie--seriously, I don't get the appeal of this guy). A big action scene involving a character sacrificing himself for to save the others makes no sense whatsoever-he's already successfully distracted the vampires by the time he seemingly decides to off himself.
That bit is actually pretty indicative of the movie as a whole: somebody came up with a sort of cool looking action scene, then awkwardly shoehorned it a thin story.
The vampires do look fairly scary, though they have little to no character or even much presense. For a film that claimed to "redefine" vampires, these vampires are pretty run of the mill ghouls. Also, given that they are supposed to be a threat keeping the characters on the run for a month, they seem easily killed--there are plenty of exploding vampire heads throughout the movie, brought about by gun shots. Meh, just another frustration.
Honestly, this has been several hundred more words than this subject requires. This movie looks nice, but is just no good.