Day Watch

Time Out says
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.
Details
Release details
Cast and crew
Mariya Poroshina
Dima Martynov
Vladimir Menshov
Galina Tyunina
Victor Verzhbitskiy
Zhanna Friske
Valery Zolotukhin
Alexei Chadov
Sergei Lukyanenko