Night Watch



If you’re anything like me, you probably have a big map of the world on the wall, and you cross off countries as they make a big budget movie with Matrix (1999) style special effects and editing. America, Japan and Hong Kong were crossed off immediately. England, Thailand and India took a little longer. Now you can cross off those eleven time zones of blatant government corruption and creeping dictatorship we like to call Russia. Night Watch (2004) is here.



Night Watch was a huge hit in Russia, out grossing even Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) in that country. It’s a supernatural action/thriller, remarkably similar in look and tone to Hellboy (2004), about a group of government sanctioned occult investigators. The group has its origins in a battle between the forces of light and dark that took place hundreds of years ago. When it became obvious the two sides were too evenly matched for either side to win the opposing generals called a truce. Each side formed a group to watch over the other and all occult activity had to be agreed upon in advance. So the Night Watch keeps track of vampires and such, while the Day Watch keeps track of whatever the opposite of a vampire is. (I dunno, the movie isn’t very clear on that point.) In the modern day the Night Watch operates under the cover of being part of Moscow’s electric utility repair crew.

Twelve years ago Anton (Konstantin Khabensky) went to a witch to get his girlfriend back, who had left him for another man. The witch cast that spell, and convinced Anton to agree to another spell that would kill the other man’s unborn baby no one knew the girlfriend was carrying. Before this mystical abortion could be completed the Night Watch broke in and stopped the witch, and Anton was inducted into the group because he could see through the Night Watch’s disguises.

Now Anton is some kind of all-purpose investigator for the Night Watch. He’s called and told that a twelve-year-old boy has entered a kind of trance that will lead him to two vampires. Anton follows the boy and confronts the vampires. Curiously, these vampires can only be seen in reflections. I’m not sure if that’s a Russian vampire thing, or a result of Anton’s special perception, or just a revisionist take unique to this movie. Anton is able to kill one of the vampires but the other, a woman, escapes. A grievously wounded Anton is taken back to the headquarters and the head of the Night Watch performs psychic surgery on him, while summarizing the origin of the Night Watch again in case we were out getting popcorn during the prologue.


"I need to get a better HMO."

From this point on the movie splits into two plots that have nothing to do with each other. The first plot has to do the kid. The remaining vampire is still after him and the Day Watch has designs on him for reasons that have to do with an ancient prophecy. The other plot has to do with a woman who has been cursed and turned into a powerful “funnel” of bad luck. The Night Watch has determined that she will cause an airliner to crash, so they have to find out who cursed her in order to send the hex back to whoever sent it.

It's obvious that the producers threw a lot of money at Night Watch. It's slick looking, and director Timur Bekmambetov constructs a few really entertaining sequences, such as when the camera follows a bolt fall off the airliner and down the ventilation system of an apartment building. But the script, oh the script! Rarely did I have any idea what was going on in Night Watch. Some of it was probably the bad subtitles ("Funnel"? I think they meant vortex.), but most of my confusion was simply because things weren't explained and the bifurcated nature of the script made it difficult to figure out how characters and scenes related to each other. Towards the end our main characters are literally running from plot to plot trying resolve them both. They don't succeed; the child subplot ends with a cliffhanger (Night Watch is the first part of a trilogy), and the hexed woman subplot ends with a ludicrous twist that left me shaking my head. I'm also at a complete loss to explain why in some early scenes Anton appears to be a vampire, or why his partner is a stuffed owl who turns into a woman.


"Hi, I'm Bono. Are you The Edge?"

Granted, I've seen plenty of supernatural thrillers from Hong Kong that make even less sense than Night Watch, and enjoyed them. But those thrillers go overboard on the action, matching the loopy plots with cool fights. There isn't much action in Night Watch. The climatic fight is between a guy we haven't seen before who pulls his own spine out to be a sword (okay, I admit, that's pretty cool) and Anton, who is wielding a florescent light bulb (not so cool), and the live action is inter-cut with shots of the action as a video game (lame). If Night Watch could have matched its visual style with either neat fights or an interesting script I would be more enthusiastic about it, but the only thing that makes it stand out now is the fact that's it's Russian.

Posted: Thu - January 20, 2005 at      

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