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Day Watch (2006)

Director: Timur Bekmambetov

Time Out rating

Average user rating

7 reviews

Synopsis

In this sequel to Russian sci-fi horror ‘Night Watch’, a man who serves in the war between the forces of light and dark comes into possession of a device that can restore life to Moscow, which was nearly destroyed by an apocalyptic event. Set in contemporary Moscow, the film revolves around the conflict and balance maintained between the forces of light and darkness - the result of a medieval truce between the opposing sides.

Movie review

From Time Out London

If you didn’t see Timur Bekmambetov’s previous fantasy movie, ‘Night Watch’ (‘Nochnoy Dozor’), the dense mythology of this diurnal sequel may defeat you. Madly over-plotted, with overlapping time frames and puzzling sub-plots, it makes no concessions to neophytes. The opening scenes whisk us back to fourteenth-century Samarkand, where Mongol warlord Tamerlane acquires the ‘Chalk of Destiny’. With this magical writing instrument, one can alter the course of history: presumably, by writing on the Blackboard of Fate.

Back in the present day, Svetlana (Maria Poroshina), a new recruit to the order-keeping Night Watch, investigates a random vampiric attack on an old lady – by her mentor Anton’s estranged 12-year-old son, Yegor (Dima Martinov). Anton arranges a cover-up to protect the boy, who has fallen under the spell of Zavulon (Viktor Verzhbitsky) and, you guessed it, gone over to the Dark Side. Meanwhile, a futuristic femme fatale drives her red sports cars up the side of a building, black vortexes of crows swarm in the skies, and every now and then the Dark Ones and the Light Ones have a paranormal punch-up in the mosquito-infested parallel world of The Gloom.

‘Night Watch’ suffered from a surfeit of fizzing images and a lack of coherent plotting. ‘Day Watch’, while still guilty of retina-punishing visual excess and heavy metal aural assault, ties itself in narrative knots. Bekmambetov heeded his own mentor, Roger Corman’s advice, that a director should ‘imitate a bigger budget than he has’. What he missed was that, if tied to a silly ‘B’ movie plot, the impact of these spectacular, aspirational images would be totally vitiated.

Author: Nigel Floyd 2007-10-01 15:23:11

Time Out London Issue 1937: October 3-9 2007

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User reviews of this film

Gavin said...

Posted on May 08 2008 20:36 Totally pants, people who rate this as good need serious help to start to get a life

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Anna said...

Posted on Oct 18 2007 21:01 mindlbowing special effects considering the budget, not that of a complicated storyline (if you could decipher POTC3 then this one is a piece of cake), Habenski is an amazing actor and Bekhambetov is a visionary director and unique in Russia so hats off to him

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Kimbo said...

Posted on Oct 13 2007 16:34 Amazing movie. If you enjoyed Nightwatch this is a worthy sequel - continues the story, develops the characters. Fantastic action, inventive use of subtitles, gripping characters. An intelligent movie.

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diane said...

Posted on Oct 09 2007 20:19 Good film.Pity about the subtitles,you miss a lot of the story reading.Not overly reccommended

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Andrew said...

Posted on Oct 07 2007 21:51 A worthy sequel to Night Watch. This movie will demand a few braincells of your attention but that's all you need to keep up with the plot. It's particularly refreshing to enjoy mythic Russian fantasy.

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Yuriy said...

Posted on Oct 07 2007 17:15 Very intresting russian move i love russians moves they are with a logical fantastic features

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Ausra said...

Posted on Oct 06 2007 15:42 i completely hated, the film is russian and with not logical fantastic features.

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