Movie review: Day Watch

by John P. Meyer

Child's toy lays waste to Moscow in this action-packed offbeat sci-fi epic.

Think for a moment: when's the last time you saw a good sci-fi/horror flick featuring vampires, shape shifters, forced transgenderism, foreplay in a fast car and a rogue ferris wheel subbing for Godzilla in the arc-lit night-time streets of downtown Moscow?

Oh, and the dialogue's in Russian (with English subtitles).

That's what I thought. Me, too, actually. So already you're getting the idea that Day Watch may provide a curiously refreshing movie-going experience. To the extent that these off-the-wall sorts of events and characters permeate the 2 hour, 12 minute good vs. evil second-part-of-an-epic-trilogy based-on-a-Russkie-novel blockbuster, that impression would be correct. However, when the slow-mo hi-res mayhem set pieces (of which there are many) play across the screen, your adrenaline-juiced thought processes will be going "wait a minute, this looks familiar..."

More than the bullet-time sequences will be familiar if you've already seen 2004's Night Watch, which sets up the characters for the action and entanglements that occur in this movie. And seeing Night Watch first actually wouldn't be a bad idea, because even though the first reel of Day Watch incorporates a 24-like synopsis of events which have already transpired, there's so much going on that those who haven't seen it might occasionally find themselves very much at sea.

Basically, we have the Dark Others who (by millennia-old agreement) rule the night, and the Light Others who likewise rule the day; each side employs a surveillance force (known variously as Night Watch and Day Watch) to police their counterparts. But the light side crew are starting to rue the day that Anton (Konstantin Khabensky, who looks not a little like a modern-day Slavic incarnation of Rod Taylor) broke the rules by hiring a dark side babushka to perform a witchcraft abortion on his girlfriend, the botched results of which have left the dark 'uns with a powerful "Great Other" in the person of Anton's not-quite-successfully-aborted son, Yegor (Dima Martynov, on the off chance that you're a maven of obscure Russian boy actors and want to follow his career). But to balance things out (as these good vs. evil tales routinely attempt to do), the light 'uns also have a Great Other in the making: Svetlana (Mariya Poroshina) seems able to navigate through "second level ghoulville" (I'm not getting this terminology quite right but you get the parallel plane of existence idea, I think) successfully without the sort of rigorous training that most Watchers need to accomplish this feat.

The big back story for this episode involves something called (drum roll, please) the Chalk of Fate - which, while it sounds like the subject of a ludicrous Monty Python grail search, ends up being an actually quite useful item that allows one to alter reality by sending the wielder back to a key decision-making juncture in his/her life - and changing that decision. But the dang thing looks pretty much like a piece of regular school blackboard chalk, which means the Guardian of the Chalk could hide it pretty much in plain sight.

So Anton wants the Chalk of Fate (I can't help thinking author Sergei Lukyanenko couldn't have come up with a less giggle-worth designation for the talisman if he'd spent a bit more time on it - I might have gone with something like Mango-Tango Crayola of the Apocalypse, perhaps) to re-order his fractured family life, while smokin' hot race-car drivin' dark 'un witch Alisa (Zhanna Friske, the only actress in this - or any other - movie to have appeared on the December 2000 cover of the Russian edition of Playboy) would just like to see what happens when she attempts to drop it down the plunging bodice of her party dress. So of course everyone I know is pulling for Alisa.

Sequences worthy of special mention: 1) the insane icy-road downtown Moscow driving sequence where Alisa pilots (and I do mean pilots) her red sports car onto the concave face of a residential high-rise, and the little Woo-worthy insert showing a maid cleaning interior windows while the car - on the glass wall outside - swoops past; 2) the steamy pseudo-lesbian shower scene involving Svetlana and Olga (Galina Tyunina), which is actually a pseudo-straight shower scene because Anton and Olga have previously switched bodies; and 3) the guaranteed-to-make-you-duck absolute shit-storm of submunitions that spring from the foil-wrapped elastic-string toy unleashed by Yegor in a fit of adolescent pique - demonstrating beyond doubt that one should never entrust children with weapons of mass destruction. Just for future reference.

Cleverly, the editorial team have given more thought to the implementation of subtitles than per usual, perhaps because they anticipate a large portion of the film's worldwide audience will be non-Russian speakers. (Smart move, that.) The titles react dynamically to their context, vibrating when a character knocks on a door, for instance, or turning blood red when someone is shot. Even better, their shade and placement are arranged such that they are legible regardless of the background upon which they appear. If I employed a star ranking system in my reviews (ugh, how pedestrian!), this would warrant an extra one.

The breathtaking action scenes alone make this film worth viewing for those who appreciate such things, as do likewise the trio of exotic female leads. While the screening I sat in on at the Magnolia early Friday afternoon was sparsely attended (was that the sound of crickets I heard in the nearly empty theater auditorium?), I predict this outrageously creative, offbeat film will generate solid word of mouth and grow its audience over the course of its commercial run.

WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE A GIRL, PART 1: "Keep your back straight - you're a woman now." - Olga (wearing Anton's body) to Anton (wearing hers).

WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE A GIRL, PART 2: "Don't mix up the doors: the one with the boy - that's not for you." - see above.

WHAT A MOSCOW AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER MEANS WHEN HE SAYS "CONDITIONS ARE GOOD": it's snowing.