6/4/07: Night Watch (2004)It couldn’t beat the latest
Pirates Of The Caribbean, but
Knocked Up came in at a respectable #2 in the weekend box office. That’s good news to folks who want to see a romantic (albeit a romantic gross-out) comedy about a young woman who refuses to have an abortion. This site remains pro-choice, and we’re not sure
Knocked Up doesn’t ultimately make a good case for both abortion and using a condom. Still, the film’s success is a pleasant pop-culture moment for certain conservatives.
(And here’s
an insightful look at the mixed attributes of
The 40 Year-Old Virgin, which came from the same comic ensemble.)
Day Watch also opened in select markets this weekend, to a lot less hype.
Night Watch—the first of a trilogy of Russian imports—got more attention when it first came out. Everyone was curious to see this big Russian hit of a horror film. Then the hipster critics couldn’t wait to downplay the fun—because, as it turned out,
Night Watch is a horror film with an anti-abortion stance.
The film starts with a long-ago
Lord of the Rings-style battle between the forces of Light and Dark. That’s a radical idea right there. Has anyone else noticed that the
Spider-Man trilogy just wrapped up without a genuine bad guy anywhere in the series? The first two films had super-villains that had been driven mad by modern technology. The Sandman turned out to be misunderstood. The only real force of evil turned out to be a wad of tar from outer space.
Anyway,
Night Watch quickly ends its own epic battle with a truce. The forces of Light and Dark agree to monitor each other with their own police forces. Then we cut to the 1990’s, where Konstantin Khabensky is hiring a witch to get him back his philandering wife—oh, and to abort the little bastard fetus that’s inside her.
This bizarre segment is where Khabensky discovers that he’s one of the abnormal types who have to choose a side between Light or Dark. More accurately, he has to choose between joining the good guys of Night Watch or the bad guys of Day Watch. This all takes place while some forces of Light stop by to put an end to that scheming abortionist—who, as it turns out, is a true force of Dark.
Night Watch proceeds to become a nice goof on appeasement as a bureaucratic tool. The forces of Dark turn out to be typical hipster vampires. The forces of Light aren’t chasing them down with stakes. The vampires have to be licensed to hunt down humans, and Night Watch mainly makes sure that the bloodsuckers abide by the proper regulations.
We learn all this in a lengthy scene where Khabensky reluctantly kills a vampire, which leads to plenty of red tape. That’s when
Night Watch settles into a tale of vampire hunters treated as an old-fashioned police procedural. Fortunately, it turns out that bold plotting and new ideas can bring back the fun of CGI effects and swooping camera angles. There are even more plot lines crammed into the film’s final hour, but that only leads to the film’s ending on a surprisingly emotional note—which brings us back to the beginning, and what could’ve been a Russian tragedy of an abortion.
Night Watch is creative, meaningful, and one of the rare foreign films that didn’t play well with critics. No surprise there.
Day Watch is pretty good, too, but slightly less enjoyable on its own. You’re probably better off waiting for the final entry in the trilogy, and watching those last two together. If all goes as scheduled, you can do that while staying at home and avoiding next summer’s entry in the
Batman franchise.
Make it your own: You can get
the American DVD of
Night Watch really cheap—mainly because most horror fans saw the film on bootlegged international DVDs about a year before it hit our theaters. The official release, however, provides some cool animated subtitles.
