We loved Night Watch, the blistering adaptation of Sergei Lukyaneko’s sci-fi novel that stormed our multiplexes in 2005 with a post-Tarantino, post-soviet, post-Matrix, post-everything swagger. Day Watch picks up precisely where director Bekmambetov left off, slap-bang in the busiest, loudest Extreme Cinema event of the year.
A slash-edited overture reminds us that the forces of Light (shape-shifters, seers) and Dark(vampires, women dressed like Dynasty extras) have maintained a truce since medieval times. Since then, Night Watch have policed the bloodsuckers while Day Watch keeps the forces of light in check. Nightwatcher Anton (Khabensky), you may recall, is now the link between two great opposing Others – his girlfriend Sveltana (Poroshina) for the good guys and his young son Egor (Martynov) who has fallen in with the nefarious crowd.
This second instalment of the trilogy – Dusk Watch is on the way – concerns the chalk of fate, a commendably lo-fi magical writing instrument in a world defined by gravity-defying car-chases, bleeding subtitles and impromptu visits to the gloom between life and death. Sadly, as all the various unhinged evil schemes are revealed, Day Watch simply can’t maintain the pace of the original film. There are plenty of kitschy, pulpy delights but nothing to match the staggering energy of the original film. Where, you wonder, have the cursed virgins, the swordplay with spinal cords, the vampire slayings gone? And is the rapture too much to ask for?