I've got notes and scores jotted down for at least a dozen reviews, and I'm reading 3 books right now, and have 2 more unwatched DVDs on my stack by the TV, so I'm tasking myself to spend an hour every day writing reviews. Here's today's effort, a disjointed, conflicted review of a disjointed and conflicted film.
Day Watch is the sequel to
Night Watch, a Russian action/occult film that did huge business in Russia and parts of Europe, but came and went with hardly a ripple in the US. That's a shame, since it was far more inventive and exciting than 90% of the formulaic action film crap Hollywood churns out, and
I rather enjoyed it, even with its flaws.
Day Watch is more of the same, and while it's more inventive in some ways, it has more flaws and is much more uneven and confused, a fact that forced me to score it a bit less generously. To the scores:
Day Watch, 2006
Script/Story: 5
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 7
Physics Believability: NA
Eye Candy: 7
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 7
Overall: 7
The 7 is largely for effort. This movie was mess, but had so many individual moments of awesome coolness and invention that it deserves credit for going there so fearlessly, and for trying so hard along the way. It's a brilliant film in many ways, but it's also very frustrating and confusing and crowded and hurried and overlong.
It felt like the script needed a couple of more passes through the editing process, to cut out extraneous scenes (most of them action-based), and to make the characters more believable and sympathetic. It's kind of a freak show now, with lots of weird magical people doing weird things, but little reason for the audience to care about them, or to root for any particular outcome.
The movie is both too long, and too short. At 132 minutes it's at least 30 minutes too long, but at the same time most of the plot material felt rushed through. In most of the human interactions and plot twists and character dynamics,
Day Watch felt like it had been edited down from a mini-series. It reminded me somewhat of
various anime movies; especially the ones made to cash in on long-running OVA series, where every character from the 50 episodes has to make an appearance in the film, and as a result there's no way to logically work them into the plot, or to provide the movie-watcher with any information about them. So they just flash through, doing their fan service thing, and fans enjoy it and movie watchers new to the intellectual property have no idea who those people were or why we should care what they did.
Day Watch had a bit of that going on, and a lot of "wouldn't it be cool/funny if we did ______" stuff. So you get random action scenes that are unnecessary and have no impact on the overall plot, and characters switching bodies just for temporary comedic confusion, and people fighting to the death at one minute since the director wanted to blow up a bunch of cars, then talking calmly the next since the plot needs to be advanced.
As for the story... hard to follow.
Day Watch assumes you have a lot of familiarity with the first film. It's set about a year later, all of the characters return and continue their actions and interactions from
Night Watch, and if you don't remember who is who and what they were up to in the first film, you're going to be somewhat lost here. I'd seen the first film just one, in theaters a couple of years ago, and as a result I had to struggle to remember who the people were in
Day Watch, when there's virtually no introduction given. The
plot summary on wikipedia is pretty good, and it's not that the plot is full of twists and turns, but that the film is so stylized with pretensions of artsy-ness, and constantly intercut with chaotic scenes of destructive action, that it's hard to dig down to the plot through the eye candy and visual flair.
Some comments by category:
Script/Story: 5A big step down from the script of the first film. Which was insane and confusing, but had narrative pull and kept the viewer interested. The weird occult/magic stuff was everywhere, but it served the plot and fit neatly into it. In the sequel quite a bit of the occult stuff is just thrown in for bonus points, and isn't required by the plot, or actively disrupts it. Plus, where
Night Watch had a whole mythology to establish and worked towards an ingenious plot twist conclusion,
Day Watch is largely random weirdness for the sake of random weirdness. I never had any anticipation for the ending since I didn't care, since I had no characters to root for, or against.
There are a lot of characters dong dramatic things, but the audience is given very little reason to form an emotional investment. So we've got lovers going crazy trying to bring their love back to life, but we don't know either of the characters so we're indifferent. We've got a dad supposedly torn between his son and his new girlfriend, but he hardly interacts with either of them, and seems far more concerned about his job than any humans he knows.
The new female lead is supposed to be a "great one," one of the strongest "others" ever, but she never does anything to show this potential. Plus, her being so powerful cheats the plot revelations of the first film, when it was made clear that the young boy was a great one, and that his birth was a legendary event, and that whichever side he chose (the dark or the light) would be strong enough to gain the upper hand in their eternal struggle. He chose the dark, through the clever plot twisting mechanizations of leader of the dark side, and that was the key climactic event of the first film. But nothing seems to have changed thanks to his decision.
Acting/Casting: 6No one is horrible, but no one is very good. This score is more about the plot really, since it doesn't give us enough reason to care about anything or anything, so their acting is kind of irrelevant to the whole package.
Action: 7Lots of cool stuff, but quite a bit of it is very gratuitous and time filling, whereas most of the action in the first film seemed integral to the plot. It felt like the director knew the action was required by fans of the first film, so there were pointless chunks of it inserted almost at random, such as the motorcycle/truck chase/battle near the end, which could not have mattered less for the ultimate conclusion of things. But there hadn't been any car chases, so they had to throw one in.
Physics Believability: NAI debated this score for a bit, before deciding not to calculate it. It would be something like -14 on a 1-10 scale, but it's intentional. It's not that there's magic in the movie; a film with magic could get a 10 on this scale, if the way the magic worked was handled consistently and believably. The Harry Potter universe is all about magic, but it's relatively consistent (except when Rowling has to invent new things, like time turners, that are used in one book and never again when they're needed to advance the plot) so it would get a fair score on this metric.
Day Watch has cool magical powers, but they is no consistency to them. All of the Others, Dark and Light, have different types of spells which they use interchangeably. If someone needs to be invisible at one point, they can be, or they can teleport through a billboard, or they can assume a new form at will. But other times they don't seem to have any powers, or they can't use them properly. The characters have whatever powers the story requires them to have, and this varies from scene to scene. It's inventive-but-lazy scriptwriting, I think.
Eye Candy: 7Nothing in the film is especially attractive, but quite a few of the special effects are very creative. The architecture and geography of Moscow are pretty ugly, even with about a meter of snow covering up the trash and detritus on the ground, (it looks
cold) but the special effects stuff is so cool they pull the score up unjustly.
Fun Factor: 5This could have been a 9, but the movie is so disjointed and confusing that it puts the viewer off, preventing you from enjoying the action and bizarre mythology of the world. This score might increase on subsequent viewings, especially if alcohol were involved.
Replayability: 7I'm guessing about this one. I'm not eager to view it again just yet, but it seems like this would either be a 2, or a 9, depending on how much you buy into the mythology and/or can unplug your brain during the repeated viewings.
Overall: 7A score given largely on potential and effort. I was bored during a bunch of the movie, since the plot doesn't pull you in or build towards a climax, but it's got awesomely cool moments all scattered throughout, and the ending is pretty clever and somewhat redeems a lot of the treading water confusion that filled the middle of the film.
Labels: movie review
