Publicity
Stills of
"Daywatch"
(Courtesy from 20th Century Fox)
Genre:
Thriller/Action/Fantasy Director: Timur Bekmambetov Cast: Konstantin Khabensky, Vladimir Menshov,
Valery Zolotukhin, Maria Poroshina, Galina Tunina, Victor
Verzhbitsky, Dima Martynov RunTime: 2 hrs 10 mins Released By: 20th Century Fox Rating: NC16 (Violence) Official Website:www.foxsearchlight.com/daywatch/
Opening Day: 4 October 2007
Synopsis:
Featuring the cinematic vision of cutting-edge Director/Writer
Timur Bekmambetov, "Day Watch (Dnevnoi Dozor)" is
the second installment of a trilogy based on the best-selling
sci-fi novels of Sergei Lukyanenko entitled "Night Watch,"
"Day Watch" and "Dusk Watch." A dazzling
mix of state-of-the-art visual effects, amazing action sequences,
and nail-biting horror, when "Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor)"
was released in its native Russia in July 2004, it became
an instant smash hit breaking all film gross records in post-Soviet
history. Set in contemporary Moscow, "Day Watch (Dnevnoi
Dozor)" 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:
Just as the almighty rubles reared their heads in Russia’s
most successful cinematic import, “Day Watch”
doesn’t miss a single beat in its histrionic continuation
of 2004’s blockbuster hit, “Night Watch”.
It remains a frantic, discombobulated product of America’s
cultural hegemony over writer-director Timur Bekmambetov's
planned occult fantasy trilogy of the struggle between the
forces of the Light and the Dark in modern day Russia. Bekmambetov
doesn’t merely reuse and rejig the aesthetic and yin-yang
philosophical afterglow of Hollywood’s own revered trilogies
– “The Matrix”, “Blade” and
“Star Wars”, but confidently infuses post-Soviet
subtext and higher-minded allegories that insist that its
vampires and witches are nothing more than tenebrous metaphors
for desire and clandestine political representation of the
subsisting working class and avaricious oligarchs. This elephant
in the room works together with the film’s diseased
depiction of the now capitalist den of Moscow’s surfaces,
with the striking colours of its neon billboards oscillating
amidst its darkened gothic grays and antiseptic flashes of
harsh, austere light.
When
we last left Anton (Konstantin Khabensky), he was on the rooftops
of downtown Moscow’s apartment complexes negotiating
between his infanticide guilt stemming from a botched mystical
abortion and the inevitable guilt festering over the causation
of his now teenage hellion son Yegor’s (Dima Martynov)
ascension into the Dark consortium’s (the Day Watch)
ominously named “The Great Other” (a derivative
of “the chosen one”), that very convenient wildcard
that puts the ball in the court of whoever holds his tenuous
confidence. For all its loaded hyper-reality and thaumaturgy
involving body-swapping, dimension hopping and the ultimate
McGuffin in the Chalk of Fate – an ancient artifact
that allows its users to revise history and subsequent reverberations
– the film’s interest does not lie with the anxieties
its society-whelped conjurers partake in, but the prosaic
visual spell that it puts itself under.
With
a spastic camera matching its hyperactive narrative, it gears
into a sort of ritualistic rigour that results in mindless
delirium which ends up aggressively overstating its own glibness
given the film’s firmly cogent initial deliberations.
“Day Watch” teeters between its self-consciously
wild stylistics and its rehashed brand of cartoon darkness,
but it’s much too lurid to be taken at the gravitas
it puts forth, and much too tepid to be experienced as genre
excesses.
Movie Rating:
(Though intermittently clever, “Day Watch” chooses
Hollywood-appropriated style over substance)
