Average Rating: 5.9/10
Reviews Counted: 125
Fresh: 73 | Rotten: 52
This Russian horror/fantasy film pits darkness and light against each other using snazzy CGI visuals to create an extraordinary atmosphere of a dank, gloomy city wrestling with dread.
Average Rating: 6/10
Critic Reviews: 31
Fresh: 18 | Rotten: 13
This Russian horror/fantasy film pits darkness and light against each other using snazzy CGI visuals to create an extraordinary atmosphere of a dank, gloomy city wrestling with dread.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.3/5
User Ratings: 99,314
Two bands of warriors, one good and one evil, battle to keep the peace in Moscow in this cat's cradle thriller from Russia. In 1342, the Warriors of Light (led by Gesser, Lord of Light) and the Warriors of Darkness (led by Zavulon, General of Darkness) declare a truce under which each side will form a law enforcement team to monitor the other side's activities. The Warriors of Light, who enforce the powers of good, patrol the Night Watch, while the Warriors of Darkness, who openly embrace evil,
R, 1 hr. 56 min.
Drama, Action & Adventure, Horror, Art House & International, Science Fiction & Fantasy
Feb 17, 2006 Limited
Jun 20, 2006
$1.4M
Fox Searchlight
All Critics (126) | Top Critics (31) | Fresh (75) | Rotten (52) | DVD (23)
The punchy, nonstop visual effects crowd out coherent storytelling.
For a good hour and change, the film is a big toy box that teases you out of the Gloom.
It has a refreshing Old World take on a never-ending fantasy war between vampires and the forces of 'light.'
What a rabid beast is Night Watch. What a pungent Russian fantasy-horror cheeseathon.
This mostly incoherent, enormously eccentric helping of mayhem breaks into so many fragments that watching the movie can be a bit like trying to assemble the pieces from several jigsaw puzzles.
Night Watch was one of the most popular movies ever released in Russia. That just proves there's no accounting for taste, in film or in human sacrifice.
A convoluted FX smear
Night Watch is a completely synthetic yet thoroughly original movie.
...better than most of our domestic product...
... director Timur Bekmambetov makes excellent use of CGI to portray the paranormal events but avoids the silly martial arts extravagance of the UNDERWORLD movies.
If it all sounds silly, convoluted, and confusing, that's because it is silly, convoluted, and confusing. It's also a hell of a lot of fun.
This muddled mess about the forces of (what else?) dark and light can barely hold itself together long enough to rip-off far better science fiction movies.
uses fantasy, horror and gobsmacking special effects to explore the greyer areas of contemporary life.
I liked it, and if your tastes run as occasionally goofy as my own, you probably will too.
The entire production seems intent on creating a mood and trapping the audience in it until the very last frame is shown, and for a fantasy film, that's how it should be done.
The film is fascinating - albeit sluggish - until the final reel. At that point, the vampire-hunter hero makes a crucial decision at odds with everything we know about his character.
Former music-video director Timur Bekmambetov cleverly toys with moral ambiguities and demoniac CGI effects like a death-metal puppeteer, though he takes it too seriously for such a shallow entertainment.
Intriguing enough to build hope that the trilogy's next two parts can make this a reverse Matrix saga: A series that becomes more clear and compelling as it goes forward.
The resulting concoction will likely baffle anyone who isn't already a fantasy/horror aficionado, but those viewers who enjoy one of these genres will get a kick out of the universe Bekmambetov has created here.
...doesn't translate as much more than a formulaic, if promising, genre tale that's often difficult to follow yet equally hard to dismiss.
A huge hit in Russia, this horror movie is a testament to how desperate for entertainment they must be over there.
There was a lot of hype surrounding this, Russia's take on the vampire myth in which the forces of light and darkness are policed by a group of shape shifting "others" in modern day Moscow. I must admit I was expecting a lot from this film but was rather disappointed. The plot is rather cliched and too easily resolved,
March 17, 2007
Super Reviewer
Incoherent, messy, rushed, and more than a little cheesy, but nonetheless has its visual thrills and inventiveness to compensate for all of its flaws, at least most of the time. The story is the part that's cheesy, pitting light and against dark in a modern day setting with vampire's and humans called "others". The
October 4, 2010Super Reviewer
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