Day Watch disappoints – Fantasy Film Review

By Steve Biodrowski

This sequel to NIGHT WATCH – a Russian fantasy film about the eternal battle between Good and Evil – is a major disappointment that repeats all the mistakes of its predecessor and then some. The first film, with its intriguing premise and elaborate back story, suffered from the need to lay out the exposition about the rivalry between the Day Watch and the Night Watch (basically secret police with psychic powers who maintain an uneasy truce between the opposing side); with the groundwork in place, one would expect DAY WATCH to build upon the foundation, using it as a jumping off place for a fast-paced, action-packed thriller. Instead, the sequel simply throws more debris on top of what was there before, until the result looks more like a land-fill than an actual structure. DAY WATCH is a mindless muddle – loud, slowly paced, and overdone; in other words, it is exactly like a bad Hollywood blockbuster, except for the subtitles.
The script is strewn with more back story, dull drama, and silly scenes that go nowhere, while mindless explosions of action erupt at regular intervals without achieving anything other than preventing bored viewers from at least taking a nap. Never has a film had so much sound and fury going on with so little actually happening.The narrative is cluttered with bits and pieces that barely fit into the overall structure, as if an architect had enough bricks for a three-story building but tried to squeeze them into a two-story building only to realize they would not all fit until he cut most of them in half and tried to cement them altogether, whether or not they aligned properly. For example, in a virtually pointless mid-section, the leader of the Night Watch transfers the soul of Anton Gorodetsky (Konstantin Khabensky) into the body of his female partner, ostensibly to hide him from members of the Day Watch. The ruse predictably fails (it never had much chance of working), and Anton is soon switched back, leaving the audience to wonder why the scene is even in the film. The only possible purpose it serves is to let the actors show off for a scene or two, playing characters trapped in unfamiliar bodies.
With a story designed this sloppily, DAY WATCH is the kind of film that works better as a trailer than as a feature. Without the confusing context of the film, much of the imagery is realized in quite breath-taking terms by director Timur Bekmambetov (WANTED), who comes across like the Russian equivalent of Michael Bay. For example, a brilliant realized special effects sequence of a car driving horizontally along the wall of a building and then crashing inside through a window. You might think this was some kind of major action set piece – a desperate rescue attempt, a race to beat the villains to some important goal – so you might be surprised to see that, in the actual film, this is just one of the many villainous henchmen (hench-woman, actually) stopping in to talk to her boss.
When a film wastes that much energy on a throw-away scene, there is nothing left to devote to propping up the story line, which wobbles like a loosely structured, poorly engineered edifice, until the whole thing simply collapses into a heap. What should have been an exciting series of ever increasing explosion turns out to be a sloppy piece of ill-timed self-domolition. By the time the dust settles, you will be wondering why so much expensive pyrotechnical expertise was required to create an ugly pile of rocks.
DAY WATCH (2006). Directed by Timur Bekmambetov. Screenplay by Timur Bekmambeto and Sergei Lukyanenko, based on Lykyanenko’s novel. Cast: Konstantin Khabensky, Mariya Poroshina, Vladimir Menshov, Galina Tyunina, Viktor Verzhbitsky, Zhanna Friske, Dmitry Martynov, Valeri Zolotukhin, Aleksei Chadov.
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