Day Watch

Phew! What an imagination these boys have!! This entire experience is very dream-like in that the strangest things make sense in this universe, you can flush yourself down a toilet, or perhaps drive a car in a MOST unusual manner, or maybe slip into another dimension to escape your enemy.

This is a world where dark ones and light ones live in an uneasy truce among the unsuspecting living. Once you get your head around this world's rules it starts to make sense and it becomes an action drama like any other, yet unlike any other. And for that, you should see it- but don't expect to understand it very much at first.. it helps if you saw the first film of this series- Night Watch, but that film sucked in comparison to this one in my opinion- and maybe that was just budgetary constraints but hey- it still sucked.

The good thing about having seen Night Watch is that it will make you like this one a whole lot more because you will understand what's going on and then focus on the plot and the action- which is quite an orgy of bizarre circumstance.

So suffer through Night Watch, then watch this and I think you will get a really unique experience out of this- it's fantasy, vampires, spell-casters and a very omnipresent Russia woven into this all. It's a must see because of it's uniqueness and to be forgiven for the occasional stupidity or clumsiness in transition it presents, it has a unique beauty that needs preservation just like a Russian. :-)

I must applaud the director for creating a scene with women and high action where you would have expected to see a man. When you see the movie- you will see what I mean, and it's just one of many of the clever and confounding -dream-rules apply- plot twists this thing will throw at you with total abandon.

I saw Night Watch some time ago and I thought: Humm... What a nice movie. Interesting. Than I went to see Day Watch on the day of the premiere. Tickets had to be bought 3 hours earlier in order to get some. There was a crowd was so packed that even visiting the toilet was impossible. When the movie was starting I thought: well just the next over-talked-about movie, nothing special, BUT What I saw just left me astonished. I could never think such thing could happen. It is comparable by grandiosity to Titanic, and to StarWars by excitement, to The Matrix by plot. I have not seen such a thing yet. It combines Comedy, Action, Drama, Triller, Sci-Fy, Fantasy, Horror in such a manner that they bond without arguments. It's a MUST SEE!!!

Generally, sequels are inferior to their parent counterparts. However, this is one of those great times when the sequel surpasses the quality of the first and stands on it's own bearings. The plot line was well written and the acting was absolutely fantastic! Watching in the native language with the subtitles merely added to the essence of the story.

GO SEE THIS MOVIE!

But, if you have read the books these movies are based on, please do not compare. It's as if Lukanyenko decided, "This is how I wanted it as a book, but it should be this way for the movie." They are basically separate entities. Yet, both extremely satisfying. You will not walk out of the movie saying, "The book was better than the movie," because you simply cannot equate the two. And if you haven't read the books. READ THEM! It is very interesting to see the absolute contrast of the author's ideas on paper and on film.

The visual effects are superb, using state of the art CGI with true artistry to create an original and interesting new look.

Unfortunately the characters are all clichés: a troubled loner cop haunted by his past, his doormat girlfriend, the crusty chief of police, the sexy bad girl, the aristocratic villain, etc.

The problem is not so much that the film makers populated the film with clichés, but that they don't do anything with them. They all play their predictable roles with predictable dialog and that's all.

Another major problem with that there is a lot of fighting, done with magic, but they never explain the magic powers, so you never know what is going on. Sometimes getting punched is bad, sometimes getting hit by a bus doesn't seem to hurt the guy. Sometimes they can shoot magic at each other, and sometimes they can't. It's visually stunning, but you don't know who is winning or losing or who is dangerous and who isn't. It's like watching a sport where you don't know the rules.

The first movie had many of the same problems, but it also had some interesting scenes, like the vampire girl in traffic and the first time the main character encounters magic. "Day Watch" has one interesting scene, the opening one set in the past, but it's bland from then on.

Night Watch personally was neither a great or terrible film, if anything it was kind of a mixed bag. Its sequel Day Watch was lacking in a lot of areas and while Night Watch was far from great it was better than this. There are definitely things to like about Day Watch. Like its predecessor it is stunning to look at, it's beautifully shot and the scenery is very Russian, very like Russian fairy-tale quality. The special effects are also great, and while occasionally erratic so is the music score with its fair share of rousing and haunting moments. If there's anything also that Day Watch does better than Night Watch is that the action sequences have more energy and cohesion, some of the stunts are a wonder to behold. The acting is not very consistent though, there are no complaints about Konstantin Khabensky who's great but supporting roles could have a tendency to feel over-compensated(Viktor Verzhbitsky) or vapid(Maria Poroshina). The story is a mess, the actual structure is very dense but more of a problem was that there was almost too much going on or written in. Things often got confused or unexplained, even both, while the pacing gets tedious towards the end and the film feels thirty minutes too long, not to mention the cop-out of an ending. There is a great Russian fantasy/sci-fi atmosphere evoked, but the overlong length, drawn out pacing and messy narrative make a film devoid of wonder, thrills or genuine excitement outside of the action sequences, special effects and stunts. The characters are fantasy clichés and next to nothing is done with them, we know they are heroes and villains and that there's a conflict of light and dark(good vs.evil) but little else. The script is the same as the story, often underwritten and stilted with the humour feeling out-of-place. The direction is the kind that does a great job with the visual side of things but any of the assets that give substance are largely ignored, it's a little more refined this time around but can be both erratic and ponderous. Again, not a terrible directing job but a case of pluses and minuses. In conclusion, no problems visually and musically but the script and story are another story put together. 4/10 Bethany Cox