麻豆社

Before you even think about going to see Day Watch, rent Night Watch on video. You might want to make notes as well, because this is hellishly complicated stuff. In brief: a truce has been enforced for thousands of years between nice superpowered vampire sorcerer mutant thingies and nasty superpowered vampire sorcerer mutant thingies. We pick up the story in contemporary Russia, where good vamp Anton (Konstantin Khabensky) has just discovered that his young son is working for the baddies.

Anton's kid is a "Great Dark One", which sounds like a chocolate ice lolly, but is actually a turbo-charged version of your basic superpowered vamp-wizard. Naturally, there is also a "Great Light One" (with nougat sprinkles) who just happens to be Svetlana (Mariya Poroshina), Anton's young and rather pretty partner in the Night Watch. Oh yeah: the Night Watch, along with their evil counterparts the Day Watch, are the unofficial police of this supernatural truce. Anyway, Anton has embarked on a quest to find the all-powerful Chalk of Fate, which is perhaps the silliest-sounding mystical macguffin in the history of fantasy cinema. However, since Day Watch also features a were-parrot and a deadly yo-yo of doom, the chalk thing doesn't really seem that implausible.

"RELENTLESS VISUAL FLAIR"

In short, this is absolute nonsense, and flabby, badly-told nonsense at that. However, it's often extremely enjoyable, thanks to some excellent performances and the relentless visual flair of director Timur Bekmambetov, who shoots even the quietest exchange as if he's trying to whap you in the face with a claw hammer. It's a pity he can't bring his talent to bear on the incoherent narrative, but the film undeniably has buckets of style, aided and abetted by some extremely funky animated subtitles.

Day Watch is out in the UK on 5th October 2007.