A Disappointing Continuation

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

I'll be honest, this movie is a mess. If it was made by Americans, people everywhere would be saying things like: "..Those f'n fat Americans and their shitty soul-less movies, they're greedy, they run out of ideas, etc...". However, since this is a foreign movie, it has been overrated. This movie tries hard to one-up American movie clichés. Its even based of a book, something that American film makers rip off frequently and then get blasted by people. This movie is like "Harry Potter"+"Constantine" on crack.The start of the movie looked interesting. It begins w/ an Asian legend about a horde of Mongols bum rushing a temple to retrieve an artifact that controls the world. They bypass a puzzle(maze) w/ brute force and take the artifact through outside of the box violence. I was told a very similar legend by a US Marshall instructor, except his legend involved Genghis Khan, a Buddhist temple, and a knot instead of a piece of chalk as the artifact. I'm guessing it was based of the Gordian Knot legend. Either way, it was a memorable war speech and the lesson of the legend is the same. The movie started w/ that irrelevant introduction, which barely had anything to do with the rest of the film. The movie just seemed to be a bunch of scenes thrown together as a pretext to show off a lot of fake looking CGI sequences. IE: birds turning into ninjas, a Mazda driving on the side of a building, flying yo-yos destroying Moscow, etc.After the opening act, we see a tormented detective driving a yellow garbage truck w/ his rookie partner, a homely looking woman who is also his lover. The garbage trucks in the movie are used by some covert Russian police agency that is... to be honest its never really explained what they are enforcing. I'm guessing they're some kind of guardians that keep the vampires in check or something. It seems that they have a truce w/ the vampire mafia, so that makes the protagonists role useless. It seems like an interesting idea, but the slow boring pace of the movie, absurd scenes, and the bad dialogue captions make it incomprehensible and hard to watch. The movie gets worse as it progresses. It builds up to this really weird final scene at a big sweet 16 birthday party where they battle it out. I'm not going to spoil the finale, but its super predictable. Any one reading this probably guessed how it ends. Its over 2 hours of incomprehensible scenes and lame cgi.

It was quite a few years ago that I watched the first movie in this series, Nightwatch. It had a quote on the jacket from Quentin Tarantino saying how this Nightwatch was as spell binding as The Lord of the Rings, and how it reminds him of works done by Ridley Scott. High praise indeed.So, I bought it. I was extremely disappointed. The movie is very slow paced. Borderline boring. It is a very interesting idea that could have used a Hollywood-like budget.Some of us may have watched some European movies during the 70s and 80s. Those movies always seems strange and boring to me, with weird music and a laid back style. Similar to older Canadian movies. This is how I found Daywatch to be. Although it is better than the prequel Nightwatch just because it's not so boring, but it never really delivers the coolness, anticipation and edge of seat action I would come to expect from a movie of this genera. It's a nice attempt, but it doesn't quite reach its goal. They also seem to completely skip character development. There's not too much of a plot, at least it's not explained all that well. The overall story of both movies is that an agreement has been reached between the forces of good and the forces of evil. They have rules in place to prevent a war between the two sides such as one that happened in their past that almost destroyed both sides. So, they have a Nightwatch and a Daywatch that are sort of like cops keeping an eye on each side to make sure no one breaks the rules. Of course, the rules get broken and these "cops" have to to break some heads.If you're really bored anyway, and you're in the rental store or a big box movie section, or even looking over the list of available movies for download at your favorite website, AND you just can't find anything you want to watch that you haven't already seen AND you just HAVE to find ANYTHING to alleviate the boredom, then by all means if you see one of these two movies go ahead and pick it up. Especially if you can get it for a cheap price (like $5).If you have something better to do or watch, then skip these movies until you're desperate.

I couldn't tell you why I returned to this saga after being immensely disappointed by Night Watch, but I did. Again I was drawn in by the same misguided hype that surrounded the first instalment.Who are these simple, easily satisfied cinema-goers that drool over basic gimicks such as the alternative subtitles in Night Watch? What about the convoluted, silly plot, complete lack of interesting characters and vague half-formed ideas? Anyway, enough of the first movie. The second, somehow manages to plum new depths of pointlessness. Again the plot is needlessly complicated in order to direct focus from the fact that there isn't really one.The characters can never arrest the attention due to the dialogue being translated (badly) from Russian, leaving sub-70's cop show acting. I can only surmise that it was more realistic in it's native tongue.For a fantasy film there seem to be very little fantastical elements, but rather some vague hints that at any moment now something might happen.The editing is by far the most insurmountable issue here though, by turns deeply serious then, suddenly, comedic. Absurd.It's all such a waste that it's hard to tell what the directors were aiming to achieve here. Hopefully it wasn't what we ended up with.

I strongly suggest watching or re-watching the first movie (Night Watch) if you're really intent on watching this one otherwise you will be lost. Day Watch does not cater well to new viewers. As a sequel to a solid first movie (that had good ideas and a fresh visual style), I found it rather disappointing, underwhelming and confusing. Some of the special effects were quite good but they were few and far between except at the very start and at the end. The English dubbing was so bad, I went back to Russian with English subtitles. I didn't like the story, nor how it was told. I also didn't like the "chalk of fate" aspect one bit and the ending is a big cheap cop-out.Rating: 4 out of 10