Movie Review

Day Watch

By John Anderson, Newsday, Zap2It.com | June 1, 2007

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'Day Watch'
'Day Watch'
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Collapsing apartment buildings, intra-coven political treachery and vampire terrorism could all mark "Day Watch" as Kazakh-born Timur Bekmambetov's sardonic critique of Putinism. Look in Bekmambetov's eyes, though, and you'll probably see a director who'd be happy to turn Moscow into an annex of the "Matrix," albeit one with an actual sense of humor.

"Day Watch" is the sequel to his huge Russian hit "Night Watch," which turned the moonlit streets of Moscow into a battleground for The Others, who, like soy sauce, come in Dark and Light. Now, with what seems to be a freer hand and a bigger budget, Bekmambetov returns with an even slicker, faster-paced and funnier take on the black magical sub-castes born in the novels of Sergei Lukyanenko and Vladimir Vasiliev.

As established in its prequel, "Day Watch" finds the uneasy truce between Darks and Lights threatened by the emergence of a Great Other on each side of the ancient divide: Svetlana (Maria Poroshina), a rather unassuming possessor of wild power, and Yegor (Dima Martynov), the glowering protege of ultimate bad guy Zavulon (Victor Verzhbistkiy). Their meeting promises the coming of the Apocalypse.

Meanwhile, Anton (Konstantin Khabensky), a member of the peace-keeping Day Watch, father of Yegor and lover of Svetlana, maneuvers around the stressed-out factions, trying to keep the world from melting down.

There's nothing to relate them except tone and scope, but "Day Watch" -- a movie about a vampire-infested city (that also happens to have great subtitles) -- resembles Lars von Trier's "The Kingdom," a made-for-Danish TV extravaganza about a haunted hospital. Both have an eclectic collection of characters, they share the driest sense of humor and neither has any respect for barriers between reality and fantasy, although "Day Watch's" "Matrix"-style action gives it an added disdain for physics. One can easily imagine Bekmambetov's epic as a soap opera, one on which the commercials would advertise garlic supplements and fang floss.
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