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Night Watch
Fox Searchlight Pictures


6.6

based on 32 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 36 votes
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FILM:

Wanted

MPAA RATING: R for strong violence, disturbing images and language

Starring Konstantin Khabensky, Vladimir Menshov, Valeri Zolotukhin, Mariya Poroshina, Galina Tyunina, Yuri Kutsenko, Aleksei Chadov, and Zhanna Friske

Night Watch is the first installment of a trilogy based on the best-selling Russian sci-fi novels of Sergei Lukyanenko (which also includes Day Watch and Dusk Watch). This visionary horror fantasy film features a dazzling mix of mind-blowing effects, adrenaline-fuelled action and suspenseful terror. (Fox Searchlight)

GENRE(S):	Action \| Fantasy \| Foreign \| Horror \| Mystery \| Sci-fi \| Suspense/Thriller
WRITTEN BY:	Timur Bekmambetov Laeta Kalogridis Sergei Lukyanenko (novel)
DIRECTED BY:	Timur Bekmambetov
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: June 20, 2006 Theatrical: February 17, 2006
RUNNING TIME:	114 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	Russia
LANGUAGE(S):	Russian (with English subtitles)

Original title "Nochnoy Dozor"; Silver Raven, 2005 Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

A contemporary Russian movie that you could honestly call revolutionary, more for its style than its politics.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

With its somersaulting trucks, drafts of quaffable blood, and skies full of digitized ravens, Bekmambetov's movie has every intention of whacking "The Matrix" at its own game.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Although this first chapter in a three-part tale is inevitably overburdened with back story, it ends on one hell of a cliff-hanger.

New York Post Kyle Smith

Night Watch may be derivative of American movies, but when our ideas ooze out of the dank Russian filter they're weirder, crazier, grimier.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

A wildly entertaining fantasy thriller that propels Russian cinema into the 21st century.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

The movie Night Watch is - oh hell, I don't know what it is. Imaginative. A mess. A small miracle, if really filmed for $5 million. (Although in rubles, that's probably a huge budget.) The first Russian horror movie I've seen. The first horror movie I've seen of any kind with subtitles.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

If you have a sneaky taste for the monstrous and a hearty appetite for the outlandish, the pulpy yet engaging Night Watch should leave you merrily sated.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

The film is filled with cool little scenes of fighting and shape-shifting, and gloomy atmosphere. Subtitles themselves have morphed into gimmicks -- sometimes they float, sometimes they dissolve, sometimes they appear in unexpected places in the frame. It's all darned nifty.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

The plot has something to do with the primordial battle between light and dark forces in the universe, and though several critics have written that it contains everything but the kitchen sink, I beg to differ. I saw a kitchen sink spinning around in there, too.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Bekmambetov's tone is so gravely serious that the drama tends to become arch and theatrical, despite sardonic punches of dark humor. But his imagery is striking (his imagination overcomes his limited budget), his style is assured and he's given the subtitle adaptation a dramatically dynamic dimension by giving the words the presence of an incantation taking physical form.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Although a voice-over prologue rumbles ominously in English, most of Night Watch is in the mother tongue, but even the subtitles do weird things - flying around in different sizes and fonts, punctuating the action.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

It's also the first apocalypse-minded franchise that's earned its downbeat mood. The action, for starters, is post-Cold War, post-Chernobyl, post-perestroika. Darkness is so much a part of the Russian psyche it must be nice to see a local movie try to put its hand toward the Light.

Dallas Observer Luke Y. Thompson

And remember, this is just part one of a trilogy. While all may not be clear yet, there's certainly enough here to make you curious about the other two parts.

Slate Stephen Metcalf

For the first hour of Night Watch, a dark, arresting, and unrelentingly weird thrill ride out of post-Soviet Russia, one feels lost. Not bad lost, as with a densely clotted mess like "Underworld: Evolution," whose mythopoetics land in the viewer's lap in concrete chunks; but good lost, exhilarated lost, like what am I watching?

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Director Timur Bekmambetov has combined two things that never connected before. He's taken a glossy Hollywood-type fantasy thriller about the battle between supernatural forces of good and evil right here on planet Earth and infused it with a homegrown, distinctively Russian soul.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Bekmambetov handles these narrative bumps with ease, infusing even the hoariest -- and goriest -- of horror movie cliches with equal parts macabre fascination and jaunty humor. The film lives up to its hype with a style, swagger and substance that will appeal not just to the fanboys (and girls) but to their uninitiated friends as well.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The film has the twin virtues of being bold and dizzying...The greatest disappointment with Night Watch is that, at a critical juncture, it fizzles.

Miami Herald Peter Debruge

Night Watch represents the best in Russian special effects, a collaboration between 42 different CGI specialty firms all working in the service of a single goal: to create the nation's most visually transgressive film.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

A wildly convoluted, preposterous vampire flick that is understood best as a sardonic social allegory.

Variety Leslie Felperin

Russian-made pic displays pro technique and visual imagination on a par with, if not better than, Hollywood frighteners, but with a distinctive Slavic accent.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Despite its cheesy blood and thunder and ludicrous "Sunshine Makers" metaphysics, this is the funniest apocalypse I've seen since George Romero's "Land of the Dead."

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

In the final act, the movie dons a more human face and commits to an absorbing tale of crime and punishment, albeit pushing the fatigued message that you can't always tell light from dark these days.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

The film may be a mess - narratively muddled and crammed with many more vampires, shape-shifters and sorcerers than one movie can handle, but it bursts with a sick, carnivorous glee in its own fiendish games.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

The ending is a huge letdown, doing little besides setting the stage for the sequel… But for a good hour and change, the film is a big toy box that teases you out of the Gloom.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

The filmmakers don't seem to realize that if a movie with a mythology this groan-inducingly convoluted doesn't have a sense of humor about itself, the laughs are going to come anyway. They just won't be of the intentional variety.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Benshis were the Japanese performers who stood next to the screen during silent films and explained the plot to the audience. If ever a benshi were needed in a modern movie, Night Watch is that film.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The punchy, nonstop visual effects (including an animation segment and stylized subtitles that sometimes suggest an online chat) crowd out coherent storytelling.

USA Today Claudia Puig

The film's mythology is a bit dodgy, and the dialogue is standard issue, but the over-the-top action sequences are occasionally fun, if gory. Ultimately, it's a formulaic, predictable take on a Hollywood staple: the vampire horror film.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Despite the film's abundant gory effects, its best technical achievement may be its English subtitles, which move about the screen for better visual and emotional impact, and sometimes dissolve into poofs of blood or other colored effects.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Everything today's young audiences are conditioned to want: incessant noise, jumpy editing, torrential music, shallow, overblown characters and sheer emptiness at its core. Imagine yourself trapped inside a two-hour video game, and you've got the Night Watch experience.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Frankly, after watching writer-director Timur Bekmambetov's grim fantasy - the first leg of a trilogy adapted from the sci-fi novels of Sergei Lukyanenko - I'm still a little confused.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

A fractious fiasco: whiplash camera movement set to raging blasts of death metal, a story so incoherent it made me wish I was watching, instead, the collected outtakes from Van Helsing.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.6 (out of 10) based on 36 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Andy H gave it a10:
This is an excellent film if you have the brains to understand what's going on. A perfect blend between hi-tech, trickery (the subtitles are excellent) and character development (how anyone could say the character of Anton is shallow is insane). Definitely watch this excellent film. And then go see 'Day Watch'.

Steve P. gave it a7:
I found that to fully appreciate the movie you need to have either, read the book, (FYI the book is much better than the movie) or watched the movie more than once. Fun and absorbing to watch, but the product placement gets in the way a bit though. My suggestion is read the book if you have the time, then watch the movie. Overall, it seems to have been done very intelligently, with the added bonus of not having to hear an American accent throughout the course of the film.

B yaa gave it a9:
I loved this movie. It was just a cool film. and even tho it was a low budget film, it takes that to its advantage. I swear, I have never wanted a flashlight more than when I saw this movie. This movie was good, the director was good, and the books and author were good.

Gabor A. gave it a3:
Yeah its weird, but not in a David Lynch type of way. More like in a Vanilla Sky type of way. Its not that all the random unexplained occurrences of this movie don't have a point. They do, it is an allegory after all. The problem is that all the random events don't tie together into anything even resembling a story. And for just stringing together a bunch of special FX scenes without being bound by them having to make any sense as a whole none of them really are that impressive. Some of them flat out cheesy.

f l gave it a10:
I loved this movie. i am learning russian, it was kinda a distraction to learning because it was so awesome. but i love this movie and the book as also good.

Bill gave it a9:
I really liked this. Not sure why people found it so hard to follow. Okay, so its hardly original, but very well done and the effects and imagination are excellent, clearly done by a mind unconditioned by hollywood.

Amurabi M. gave it a5:
This is the firs part of a trilogy and the movie just works as a presentation of a lot of characters and a definition of style. This is just the first effort to take some people to the cinemas to watch an ambitious mix of science fiction, horror and indie filmmaking, so the audience must get this film as that. "Night Watch" must not be taken seriously as a film, but as a part, a fragment of a whole. Because the film has the looks of a simple sequence and its reaches don´t jump more high.

Night Watch Fox Searchlight Pictures

Night Watch
Fox Searchlight Pictures