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The Russian import, NIGHT WATCH, has the right touch of otherworldliness. In the stylish visuals and the snazzy effects there is the sense of reality reconfigured into a place where good and evil aren’t so much philosophical premises as actual armies doing battle over the ever popular battleground of planet Earth. In fact, that is the plot in a nutshell. Where it stumbles, and badly, is in the execution, or rather, the evisceration. Though running 110 minutes or so, there is a distinctly truncated feel to the proceedings. It’s as though some overzealous editing has taken what should have been a novel excursion into a land of vampires and those who keep them in line and made it an exercise in frustration.
This first part of a putative trilogy, the third to be filmed in English, starts with a broken heart. That would be Anton’s (Konstantin Khabensky) and rather than getting on with his life, he’s decided to visit a witch who has promised him that he can get his wife back. She’s also told him that the child he didn’t know she was carrying is not his, but that she can get rid of it by means of her occult arts, just as long as Anton is willing to accept responsibility for the sin. It’s all academic, because Anton is about to discover that he’s more than a mere bystander in the grander scheme of things. He is, in fact, an Other, a special class of people with special gifts, like witches, shapeshifters, and in Anton’s case, seeing the future. They co-exist with mere mortals, but keep their true identities a secret until the need to feed or to save someone from being fed upon arises.
Jump ahead 12 years to the present and Anton has taken his place in the army of light, which has been keeping the army of darkness (no relation to the film of that name) in check for centuries. He’s one of the eponymous Night Watch, which keeps tabs on the bad guys. There is also a corps called the Day Watch, charged with keeping an eye on the good guys, each making sure that free will stays in play for everyone concerned.
Director/ co-screenwriter Timur Bekmambetov has conjured up an fascinating premise with a solid internal logic and a suitably Slavic black humor sprinkled liberally throughout. The head of the army of light runs the Moscow light company and his army isn’t so much a crack fighting force, though they are that, too, as a band of bureaucrats enforcing regulations, filling out forms, and granting licenses. Rather than sleek sports cars, they putter around in an ungainly truck with jet engines and an uncanny ability to perform acrobatics that belie the bulk at work. Anton’s next door neighbor in the ratty building where he dwells is a Day Watch type, but they maintain a sort of friendship that hearkens to the sort of suspicious fellowship that flourished under the Soviets, when no one could be quite sure who was KGB and if they were, if it was something to worry about.
There is no Goth glamour here, no anarchic punk, but as time telescopes and jumps in the omnipresent shadows, here made manifest as a separate dimension dubbed “the gloom”, there is something dynamic in the cool, stylized visuals and the world-weary zeitgeist punctuated with fanciful almost heretical whimsy. Good guys feverishly track down that rarest and, apparently, most dangerous of all exotically mythical creatures, a virgin, and a cursed one at that, which makes things very dicey for anyone or anything that comes into contact with her. Meanwhile the bad guys track down a kid who, like the virgin, is as the center of a preternatural vortex and who takes his cues for fighting vampires from dubbed reruns of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”.
NIGHT WATCH has all the essentials of a rocking good tale that takes a savage gloss on the world the rest of us live in, but there is no finesse, save for the novel approach to the subtitles that slither in and out of camera shot. The audience consumes what transpires on screen, but is not allowed to savor any of it as the plot runs pell-mell into its next trope. It’s well worth the ride, though, even if that sense of melancholy is as much the result dashed expectations as of any empathy felt for the tortured souls depicted on screen.
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