Day Trippin'
Vampires, prophecies, and writing tools run amok in the anemic confusion of "Day Watch." (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: Like Night Watch, there's plenty to feast the eyes on- especially if you're high.
The Downside: Like Night Watch, there's nothing more to it. Just say "nyet."
And here I was, just about to step into August thinking the title of the worst possible name for a summer blockbuster deus ex machina had been claimed by Transformers and the so-called "Allspark." I thought that, until Day Watch came along and I was introduced to the (drum roll please... dum, dum, dum...) Chalk of Fate!!!! The Chalk of Fate is exactly what it sounds like- a piece of chalk that wields the incredible power to alter human destiny or perhaps scrawl out the lunch special in a seedy Moscow diner. It's the goofy MacGuffin that everyone in this over-boiled piece of Eurasian sci-fi tomfoolery is after, yet ironically the Chalk of Fate (dum, dum, dum... okay, I'll stop that now) is only a tertiary interest to the goings on of Day Watch. In fact, just about everything in Day Watch seems to have been relegated to back-seat importance. Day Watch exists for its own sake, to be a hit of stand-alone-holy-sh** extasy that sends you on a two-hour-plus false sensory high.
Day Watch is a follow-up to the smash Russian export Night Watch, both of which hold the record as the highest grossing films in the former Soviet Union- leading one to the aching conclusion that there is much to be said for killing your time with vodka, gray winters, and The Brothers Karamazov. In Night Watch we were introduced to the legions of Dark and Light, waging an uneasy truce in modern times and each employing their own armies of supernatural "Others" to keep an eye on each other. Night Watch didn't make a whole lot of sense, but it managed to eek out a story about a low-level Other named Anton (Konstantin Khabensky) trying to rescue his lost son from the Master of Darkness, Zavulon (Viktor Verzhbitsky). Day Watch picks up a few years later as Anton's son has been inducted into forces of Evil and as the forces of Good try to balance out the equation with the training of their own "Super Other" (Mariya Poroshina). If you're getting a chuckle just reading this then you're catching on to the kitschy, weirdo vibe that made the first film such a cult hit across the pond. This parade of convoluted claptrap that passes as a story has only been the nutty icing on this wacked-out cake- director Timur Bekmambetov has always been like the Kahzakstanian Stephen Sommers, a workman who indulges in pack-em-in till it hurts spectacle while leaving the pesky details like dialogue and acting behind in the CGI dust.
Both movies are essentially the same, despite its outlandishness Night Watch managed to be some fun due to its supreme outlandishness, but Day Watch takes the comparable high-octane-zero-smart road, and almost fatally throws a bit of tedium into the mix. Coming in at over two hours, Day Watch feels drawn and quartered by at least thirty considering that its predecessor was a much leaner package and that what is there on the screen isn't consequential enough to worry about how much of it is there to begin with. Bekmambetov's Gospel is the same- to make his movie a far-flung special effects trip designed to seduce viewers with things done in ways they've never seen before. We've had that kind of movie over here with The Matrix, but for love or hate, through the course of three movies at least The Matrix went somewhere, while Bekmambetov's fledgling trilogy (apparently based on but not very faithful to a series of books by Sergei Lukyanenko) doesn't do much beyond recycle the same dance card over and over. Innovative and fresh is exciting the first time around. Innovative and fresh just isn't innovative or fresh the second.
And there's the high Goofiness Quotient. It was cool in Night Watch to see a guy pick up a box truck with one hand or use his spinal cord as a sword, so why did I get the vibe of watching a low-level Mystery Science Theater 3000 hopeful here, when one character advises another who's about to enter "the gloom" to watch out for mosquitoes, or when the fate of Moscow- and all of humanity- is imperiled by what I can only describe as the Bollo Ball from Hell? Day Watch has somehow surpassed the realm of Saturday Night Live and The Onion and has become its own parody.
What does work for Day Watch is still Bekmambetov's very unique guerilla look for his films. He manages to dress the movie in a rough-at-the-edges guise that it announces that it isn't the kind of slick Hollywood behemoth that overwhelms budgets and underwhelms audiences. Working with a budget that would actually be less than some supporting actors in some movies, Bekmambetov makes every rubble work- the effects are jagged and hardy but never cheap, actually making it a small champion for everything good that can come out of the connotation of a low-budget film.
But still, one wonders what a man with as much blow-out-the-doors ambition as Bekmambetov could do if had a real movie to work with. While its visuals may be a marvel, the script still is mired in an infuriating mix of ponderousness and self-importance, like a South Park production of The Seventh Seal and the acting is the kind of smelly, rotten, dehydrated ham that could probably still be found in soldiers' rations dating back to Khrushchev. This all conspires to make Day Watch little more than a flash-in-the pan gimmick, the kind of film that gets an unnatural bump in the ratings on the Internet Movie Database early on only to be consigned to the obscure bargain bin of history in the long run. Day Watch might be an early preview to some new and way-cool way to look at cinema in the future, but there's nothing to hang our hat on here. It revels in its own pop-culture glory a bit prematurely- because if Bekmambetov can't find some thematic or emotional tie-downs for his series, not even the Chalk of Fate will be able to save them from the big, ominous black hole of insignificance that's awaiting.
Dum, dum, dum. C-
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