Day Watch requires the viewer to surrender to the bizarre and often unfathomable logic of the fantasy world it creates. But in case you want to try and make sense of things, here's a recap of what happened in
Night Watch , the first film of this planned vampire trilogy.
Day Watch
Way back in the 14th century the Warriors of Light and the Warriors of Darkness were engaged in intense fighting. But the battle raged, the opposing leaders realized that fighting is futile. The forces of good and evil were just too evenly matched. So a truce was called and a system put in place to ensure that the balance of power stayed balanced. The Day Watch, manned by the Dark side, keeps tabs on the forces of light. The more difficult job, though, falls on the beleaguered shoulders of the Night Watch team their daunting task is to keep evil in check.
Flash forward to 1990's Moscow. Anton (the appealingly hang doggish Konstantin Khabensky) is part of the 20th century Night Watch crew. He's also one of the others, humans with supernatural powers. He has the authority to arrest and even kill the witches, warlocks, vampires and shape shifters who get out of line. Anton has a low-tech arsenal that includes cheap sunglasses and a rusty flashlight. By contrast, the Day Watch folks drive fancy cars and flaunt a style thats somewhere between Russian Mafia and nouveau riche. The Day Watchers are punky aristocrats and the Night Watchers are like urban peasants.
The new film Day Watch finds Anton training a young and potentially powerful member of the Night crew, Svetlana (the lovely Mariya Poroshina). He's also trying to cope with the fact that his young son has crossed over to the dark side and may be the chosen one who can bring the apocalypse. Complicating matters is the fact that the murders of some dark side vampires are being pinned on Anton. In order to maintain the fragile peace between the two sides, Anton may have to be handed over to the forces of Darkness as per the terms of the truce agreed upon some 600 years ago.
One of the night watch crew in Day Watch
Based on Sergei Lukyanenko's series of best-selling novels, Night Watch, Day Watch and the upcoming Dusk Watch create a detailed mythology about the forces of Darkness and Light a mythology that sometimes gets complicated. This complicated and ancient mythology is then played out within the urban landscapes of contemporary Moscow. The trilogy is being directed by Timur Bekmambetov. Bekmambetov comes from a music video and commercial background where he's hyped such American products as Coke, Pepsi and Apple. Director Bekmambetov draws more the adrenaline pumping style of Hollywood action films than on such Russian comrades as film pioneer Sergei Eisenstein. As a result, Bekmambetov's first installment in the vampire trilogy, Night Watch , became a genuine homegrown blockbuster that beat out such Hollywood fare as Lord of the Rings and Spiderman 2. And Day Watch seems to be heading toward similar box office records.
Day Watch
Now to be honest, Day Watch suffers from some of the same bloat that's weighing down many of Hollywood's summer blockbusters. But what makes the excesses of Day Watch more acceptable than those of Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is a sense of fun. The Pirates crew indulges in excesses because no one ever says no to them; they have a budget the size of some small country's economies; and they do whatever they want because they can. Hmmm, does that sound familiar?
On the other hand, Bekmambetov and company are enjoying the giddy rush of playing with big toys for the first time in their lives, and they are reveling in the novelty. They destroy Moscow with the same glee that Godzilla has in stomping Tokyo. Even though Day Watch is probably a good 20 minutes too long, it's easier to forgive its excesses because Bekmambetov just seems to be having so much fun he's like a kid being given $1000 and told to buy anything he wants in the toy store. Now just for comparison let me point out that Pirates 3 cost some $200 million and Day Watch a meager $4 million and change. So Bekmambetov is working with far less and he's still delivering the goods. The effects and the stunts are all impressive.
But what makes Day Watch so enjoyable is not so much the ways in which Bekmambetov successfully imitates American genre filmmaking but rather in how he maintains a Russian flavor. Although many of the effects have a slick Hollywood feel, he also endows the film with some charmingly low-tech moments. Take for example, a scene where Anton must assume someone else's physical appearance to sneak into a party. He simply presses the man's face in the snow, lifts the indented snow to his own face and when he removes the snow, he looks like the other guy! The willingness to do something so simple and to expect the audience to buy into it is actually quite refreshing.
Bekmambetov also makes use of Muscovite landmarks and turns post-Soviet grunge into something hip and cool. He also endows the Protectors of Light with a Soviet-style bureaucracy that can make for some amusingly absurd situationslike needing to get a license for a vampires first kill. Theres a funny Soviet logic to the notion of licensing and regulating evil (although that was used to better effect in Night Watch). In Day Watch, the focus is definitely on ramping up the action. As with the Hong Kong action films of the late eighties and early nineties, Day Watch proves the international appeal of high adrenaline filmmaking, which needs no translation.
Day Watch (rated R for language and action violence) is in Russian with some very creative English subtitles. The creativity is not in the translation but rather in the clever way the text on the screen reflects whats being said or how people are talking. So words shatter, blur and vibrate in sync with whats being said and the action occurring on screen. I can't decide if it's a distraction or a fun addition. Anyway, I highly recommend Day Watch over Pirates 3 for summer action fun.
Companion viewing: Night Watch, Blade, Mr. Vampire, Near Dark
