Day Watch (2007)

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Night Watch personally was neither a great or terrible film, if anything it was kind of a mixed bag. Its sequel Day Watch was lacking in a lot of areas and while Night Watch was far from great it was better than this. There are definitely things to like about Day Watch. Like its predecessor it is stunning to look at, it's beautifully shot and the scenery is very Russian, very like Russian fairy-tale quality. The special effects are also great, and while occasionally erratic so is the music score with its fair share of rousing and haunting moments. If there's anything also that Day Watch does better than Night Watch is that the action sequences have more energy and cohesion, some of the stunts are a wonder to behold. The acting is not very consistent though, there are no complaints about Konstantin Khabensky who's great but supporting roles could have a tendency to feel over-compensated(Viktor Verzhbitsky) or vapid(Maria Poroshina). The story is a mess, the actual structure is very dense but more of a problem was that there was almost too much going on or written in. Things often got confused or unexplained, even both, while the pacing gets tedious towards the end and the film feels thirty minutes too long, not to mention the cop-out of an ending. There is a great Russian fantasy/sci-fi atmosphere evoked, but the overlong length, drawn out pacing and messy narrative make a film devoid of wonder, thrills or genuine excitement outside of the action sequences, special effects and stunts. The characters are fantasy clichés and next to nothing is done with them, we know they are heroes and villains and that there's a conflict of light and dark(good vs.evil) but little else. The script is the same as the story, often underwritten and stilted with the humour feeling out-of-place. The direction is the kind that does a great job with the visual side of things but any of the assets that give substance are largely ignored, it's a little more refined this time around but can be both erratic and ponderous. Again, not a terrible directing job but a case of pluses and minuses. In conclusion, no problems visually and musically but the script and story are another story put together. 4/10 Bethany Cox

I'll be honest, this movie is a mess. If it was made by Americans, people everywhere would be saying things like: "..Those f'n fat Americans and their shitty soul-less movies, they're greedy, they run out of ideas, etc...". However, since this is a foreign movie, it has been overrated. This movie tries hard to one-up American movie clichés. Its even based of a book, something that American film makers rip off frequently and then get blasted by people. This movie is like "Harry Potter"+"Constantine" on crack.The start of the movie looked interesting. It begins w/ an Asian legend about a horde of Mongols bum rushing a temple to retrieve an artifact that controls the world. They bypass a puzzle(maze) w/ brute force and take the artifact through outside of the box violence. I was told a very similar legend by a US Marshall instructor, except his legend involved Genghis Khan, a Buddhist temple, and a knot instead of a piece of chalk as the artifact. I'm guessing it was based of the Gordian Knot legend. Either way, it was a memorable war speech and the lesson of the legend is the same. The movie started w/ that irrelevant introduction, which barely had anything to do with the rest of the film. The movie just seemed to be a bunch of scenes thrown together as a pretext to show off a lot of fake looking CGI sequences. IE: birds turning into ninjas, a Mazda driving on the side of a building, flying yo-yos destroying Moscow, etc.After the opening act, we see a tormented detective driving a yellow garbage truck w/ his rookie partner, a homely looking woman who is also his lover. The garbage trucks in the movie are used by some covert Russian police agency that is... to be honest its never really explained what they are enforcing. I'm guessing they're some kind of guardians that keep the vampires in check or something. It seems that they have a truce w/ the vampire mafia, so that makes the protagonists role useless. It seems like an interesting idea, but the slow boring pace of the movie, absurd scenes, and the bad dialogue captions make it incomprehensible and hard to watch. The movie gets worse as it progresses. It builds up to this really weird final scene at a big sweet 16 birthday party where they battle it out. I'm not going to spoil the finale, but its super predictable. Any one reading this probably guessed how it ends. Its over 2 hours of incomprehensible scenes and lame cgi.

Anton Gorodetsky is in the night watch working with his lover Svetlana. He finds himself in the middle of an approaching conflict between the forces of the Light and the Dark due to his trying to destroy evidences against his son Yegor, who is in the dark side. His actions are a breech of the weak truce that keeps both the Day and Night Forces at peace.This is the sequel to Night Watch, a movie that I haven't watched and, after watching this film, I will never do.Day Watch is a moronic senseless and pretentious film, with mediocre and pedestrian acting, and good special effects. The movie is boring since the beginning, a long agony to watch through til the end. It is badly edited, with a poor direction of actors, a stupid script, and clichéd images. Day Watch is a collection of film sins that cannot be ignored, and that should be used in film schools to demonstrate what not to do when directing.The movie, and the director, could be excused if the movie was a low budget film with amateur actors but this is, instead, a Russian super-production with some good actors. Some bad movies really make you laugh, or at least they are entertaining, so at least you get something out of them. But this is not the case here, as the movie is pretentious and serious beyond belief even in those scenes that are supposed to be funny.One of the worse films I have seen for a long time. It is difficult to understand why such a stupid bad film has a rating of 6.5.The best thing about the film? The poster and the special effects.

The movies production was fantastic. The subtitle interaction with the action of the movie was phenomenal. I liked the dark intense feel of their world, using the magic sparsely. A lot of the Hollywood crap was left out, however, saying that, the movie lacked a lot, namely Paranoia of post-soviet Russia, investigation and constant angst.By that I mean the plot of the book. I haven't seen NightWatch yet, but I read all three books, and after seeing DayWatch, I can only hope that Nightwatch would be more faithful to the original story. The mash-up of characters and their plot lines was borderline insulting. Anton, in the book was a light one who questioned the need for the two sides and the inquisition. Anton, in the movie had previously struck a deal w/ a witch to have his ex-wife hurt/murdered? No no, this was another character altogether in the books. I felt betrayed by the dual-sided nature of Anton in the movie, granted him being a pawn of both sides did carry through well, however it seemed he really rode the line of dark and light. The imagery of the "gloom" or "twilight" as the English adaptation of the book calls it, used little fly like bugs, but with all the CG in the movie, they could have kept it gray and gloomy instead of a surreal sped up version of the real world. The love plot between a dark one and a vampire mashed up a couple different plot lines and had they stuck to the story, the movie could have been bigger than the Matrix, or Lord of the Rings, both in Russia and here in the US.The stories are so in-depth and well imagined that they lend themselves to movie adaptation. All-in-all, a great,if not a bit rushed, action-fantasy flick, but a very disappointing adaptation from book to movie.