I loved Night Watch, I thought it was an incredible viewing experience; full of gorgeous photography, very cool special effects, wonderfully inventive action scenes, and a cool premise; even if the whole thing comes of as a kind of Russian version of The Matrix.

I was very excited to see the middle part of this trilogy, Day Watch. The film jumps right in with not even the most basic of wrap-ups of the events from the last film. It had been over a year since I'd seen Night Watch, besides the lead character and the main premise, I didn't remember much of it. So I felt like I was playing catch-up for much of the film. Which is something I like for most films, usually I'm about 10 steps ahead, but as a sequel, I wanted a little bit of a reminder. I'll have to go back and re-watch it.

Day Watch continues the story of Anton, an agent of Light, who discovered a whole new world in the first film; where the forces of good and evil are in a constant battle to keep things even, so the world doesn't come to an end. He and his team continue their struggle against the Dark side. This time they're searching for something called the "chalk of fate", which when written with can basically grant wishes. Obviously a potent tool for either side.

I'm not sure if it was my catching up, but I never connected with this film the way I did with Night Watch. It has the same top-notch filmmaking, but I didn't latch onto the characters the way I did the first time. Even Anton seemed kind of stand-offish. There's a large section of the film, where he changes bodies with a women, which is kind of funny for a while, but grows tiresome. And it never is fully explained why it might save him. That was a big problem with the film, a lot of it is never fully explained, you're not quite sure what the characters motivation is much of the time.

Another little thing that I missed from Night Watch was the very cool subtitles, that grew and changed with the character's inflection; we're left with the standard boring ones here.

Day Watch has a lot of action, but not a lot of moves the plot forward, just plays as eye candy. The end kind of ruins the whole film as well, it basically erases everything that just happened, which makes it all seem pointless. We'll see how that plays out with the final film Twilight Watch. The middle section of a trilogy is always the toughest, it may play better once the films are complete. It's not a bad film, but it didn't grab me in the same way.

While watching this, I began to wonder when director Timur Bekmambetov would make his first Hollywood film. His sense for action and effects would fit in perfectly. The same night, I came across the trailer for Wanted an over-the-top action film starring Angelina Jolie and noticed his name in the end credits.