The Interceptor

As much as I hate to say it this seems to be Russia's response to "The Matrix", an awe-inspiring orgiastic extravaganza with revelatory fight scenes and a twist on what is reality. This version of Neo is a special operative Ivakin (Andrey Chubchenko), who in the opening scene tumbles from a plane through forest coverage and miraculously survives. From then on we get to meet Georgiy Kurylo (Aleksandr Baluev), a political figure with dark unclear plans (left unclear even after the end credits). Enter guns, hot chicks, fast cars, big blasts and a lot of meaningless filler.

A movie with such visual pizazz, but lacking any constructive build to punch home a semblance of coherency. Instead viewers are overladen with imagery, that is supposed to somehow supplant a story. The other extreme of American blockbusters, which feel the need to disclose every single detail, this pic goes to lengths to avoid explaining anything. The characters remain empty shells, which lack any emotional pull. It is essentially nothing more than a random sequence of extremely well-conceived, inpenetrable and imaginative set pieces and/or VFX, barely guled together by a convoluted and unfocused story, which does it's best to create an alienating experience.

By the end you don't really care about the story, what happens to our heroes or where this will take us in future outings. What's worse you stop even admiring the view.

The dazzling, Russian-made, sleekly super-charged, science fiction, thrill-overkill, 'Zapreshchyonnaya realnost' aka 'The Interceptor' (2009) is a frequently exciting, supremely polished, visually spectacular, Tech-noir/action extravaganza that, entirely curiously, has yet to establish much of a fan base who would vociferously extol the film's all-too considerable merits! While the convoluted narrative of crypto-evil corporations and their gleefully grandiose, internecine struggles for total world dominance/annihilation is, to be fair, entirely derivative, and not just a little bit uninspired, and while, regretfully, 'The Interceptor' occasionally over-eggs certain sequences, thereby stretching all plausibility to the giddiest extremes of B-Movie absurdity, it is never once dull or sickly-sentimental, and for this most welcome boon, I can readily forgive these momentary lapses into tired sci-fi tropisms. And having 'The Interceptor' generously endowed with a suitably masculine male protagonist in the steel-thewed, heroically-handsome figure of fleet-footed special forces butt-kicker, Matvey Sobolov,(Igor Petrenko), merely increased the sinuous authenticity of this altogether exhilarating, gravity-defying, 'super-dude against the nefarious machinations of some esoteric, supernatural, super-weapon wielding villain' adrenalized action-fest, that any less judgmental fan of 'Nemesis', 'Day Watch' or 'Equilibrium' might well enjoy as much as I did!

This is a truly awful film, that has to be said, but somehow they've put so much energy into the special effects that it becomes sort of compelling, in the sense you want to see how bad it can get. The plot is a very basic, juvenile fantasy of good and evil. In this case evil in corrupt politicians who are run by evil forces from another dimension opposed by the good guys, a joint effort of a rebellious vigilante group, a lone wolf special ops agent and som white magic types that look like they may have escaped from a Canadian spin-off of Lord of the Rings together with the cheesy green screen backgrounds. The overall effect is rather as if you would start off with a Turkish soap opera, add some Transporter, a dash of The Matrix, some snatches from Counterstrike. It has a certain entertainment value if you don't have to pay for it.

I love nightwatch/daywatch and picked this up in the supermarket-what a mistake. The story is confusing and nothing or no-one is ever explained. the music is plain even during the action scenes, and not one person in the film had to 'act'. what little dialogue there is is churned out in monotone sentences, and there is no character development. I had to stop this before the end. I was a little tipsy but 15 mins into the film i was stone sober, so i was certainly trying to figure out what was going on. The special effects are pretty dodgy and over used to fill time it seems, at least in nightwatch(which had similar effects) they were put to good use. i wouldn't recommend this film to anyone unless you fancy a dreamy bit of background noise. Sorry if this sounds harsh but i couldn't find anything good about it, waste of £5.

The only good thing about this movie is that it is quite short. All the time of watching it I have been hesitating - to stay or to leave. At last I decided to watch until the end just because I was too lazy to make any additional moves. It is the kind of movie which is possible to watch in three cases only - 1) you are underage; 2) you are drunk; 3) you are one of the cast or crew. I am nothing of above. I even didn't like how it was cut technically. It almost had no any bright color smears. Looked constantly grey - even not like made in black and white - that would be classic - but boring grey. And that terrible electronic set of sounds - I cannot call it music... And it is to say nothing of the plot. When a powerful organization instead of just sending a sniper to kill a lonely guy on the lake sends a moto boat full of stupid freaks with guns... Just because it would be more picturesque when you watch it on a big screen...