Just finished watching Day Watch. More enjoyable than the first film, if messier, and I thought the complaints about it being incomprehensible were not really justified - at least until the end, which had me hunting through Wikipedia to see if I'd read it right. I still don't get the final scene with Semyon, but the rest more or less makes sense now.
The absence of the animated subtitles from the first film is irritating (I wonder if there's a future edition of the DVD in the pipeline) but it was still pretty decent. Same characters as before, some ropy acting (only the actors playing Geser, Olga and Zavulon seemed able to underplay a scene), some decent effects (the destruction of Moscow) and some nice touches of humour (some of the body-swap comedy, the footballer's photo repulsed at being kissed by a celebrating security guard).
Two moments that stuck in the throat, though: the tacky hints at a lesbian love scene that seemed to have been borrowed from 1980s straight-to-video soft porn, and the wilfully cheeky advertising for another film in the middle of it.
I've really no idea where they'll go with the next one, given the happily-ever-after hints in the ending; I've not read the books but I've read that they're not exactly faithful interpretations anyway.
The absence of the animated subtitles from the first film is irritating (I wonder if there's a future edition of the DVD in the pipeline) but it was still pretty decent. Same characters as before, some ropy acting (only the actors playing Geser, Olga and Zavulon seemed able to underplay a scene), some decent effects (the destruction of Moscow) and some nice touches of humour (some of the body-swap comedy, the footballer's photo repulsed at being kissed by a celebrating security guard).
Two moments that stuck in the throat, though: the tacky hints at a lesbian love scene that seemed to have been borrowed from 1980s straight-to-video soft porn, and the wilfully cheeky advertising for another film in the middle of it.
I've really no idea where they'll go with the next one, given the happily-ever-after hints in the ending; I've not read the books but I've read that they're not exactly faithful interpretations anyway.
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