Friday, October 30, 2009

Night Watch

The best things I can say about Night Watch (2004) are that it had some very unique and fun visuals, and a pretty good lead performance from Konstantin Khabenskiy. The rest, well.... superfluous, silly, or downright stupid. For every sweet and artistic visual (e.g., Zavulon extracting his own spine and wielding it as a bitchin' sword), there was an equally tired and lame one (the Nightwatch's utterly stupid souped up, flame-spewing yellow truck; Tiger Cub's ridiculous transformation into, well, an incredibly cheesy-looking tiger). The ubiquitous CGI crows, dark clouds, and lightning also contribute to a mood that is just a bit too laughable. The film gets pulled in too many directions and follows too many pointless plot sidetrips in favor of cramming more hit-and-miss visuals into an already overloaded visual palette. Night Watch gets stuck somewhere between epic fantasy and urban techno thriller, and the result is just not pretty.

Night Watch is the story of an ancient and epic battle (or rather, an avoidance of a battle) amongst a group of superhumans called the Others, some of whom have chosen Dark and some Light. The forces are so evenly matched that a true battle would result in total and pointless annihilation. Deciding this is a bad idea, the Others make a truce and erect a sort of underground bureaucracy wherein Light kinda rules the roost and issues permits to Dark to "legally" carry out their vampiric tendencies within certain limits. All of which makes an epic battle between good and evil about as riveting as the tax code.

We are told that every Other has a unique power that they must discover, but the group presented to the audience is pretty homogenous. The side of Dark seems to be largely, if not entirely comprised of vampire-like creatures (yawn). In Light's corner, we have two shape-shifters (Bear and Tiger Cub), who we only see in action once, and the special effects there are dubious at best. We also have two Light Others who seem to have no special powers at all: one of them just drives a truck around and the other appears to be a simple computer nerd. Wow. Stunning. Then there's Olga, who first appears as an owl, but transforms into a human-formed sort of all-purpose sorceress, all the while vaguely spouting about being imprisoned within the form of the owl for some sort of unspeakable crimes. That subplot, which actually seemed intriguing, goes where most of the scattered fragments of this movie go: nowhere. Finally, there's Anton, our hero (or antihero, if you will). I actually like Anton. Khabenskiy does a great job of bringing Anton's multi-layered, gray-area character to life. In fact, Anton is the only character that feels complete, sufficiently fleshed out, and believable. Plus, he actually has powers! He has the power of precognition, and if he drinks some delicious blood beforehand, he can kinda morph into a vampire for a short time and go hunt down some Dark side baddies.

The plot centers (well, I use "centers" very loosely here) on Anton's attempt to keep 12-year-old Yegor, a burgeoning Other, out of the hands of a crazy vampire bitch who wants to drain him in retaliation for Anton killing her lover. Oh yeah, and Zavulon, the lord of Darkness, seeks Yegor as the fulfillment of some arcane prophecy. And there's an extremely tenuously related sideplot about an evil vortex that springs up around a cursed virgin. Seriously. Oh yeah, somehow related to this is an airplane that's about to crash land in Moscow, but yet magically is okay for like 3 hours until the plot moves along sufficiently to cut back to the doomed airplane. And there's an explosion at a power plant that sends Moscow into darkness (just in time to create a great atmosphere for Anton's showdown with the cursed virgin!). The point I'm getting at here is that director Timur Bekmambetov flits around from plot piece to plot piece like a freaking hummingbird on coke. Most of this stuff is extraneous and unnecessary, and then left to straggle out into a dead end. It's sloppy filmmaking, plain and simple.

I can't recommend Night Watch in good conscience. It's the first film in a trilogy, and maybe they get better, but I just can't see mustering the desire to put myself through another one to test it.

Storyline & plot: 3/10
Cinematography & effects: 5/10
Music & mood: 3/10
Performances: 6/10

The Reverend says: 4/10

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