Over The Top... Did You Say Over The Top?

Do not go see Day Watch if you are high. Let me repeat that.

DO NOT SEE DAY WATCH IF YOU ARE HIGH!!!!!

Don't smoke pot. Don't do mushrooms. Don't take Ecstasy.

Your head will explode and you will impair your appreciation of one of the most hallucinogenic visual experiences that the movies have offered in a long time. Timur Bekmambetov makes Guillermo del Toro look like Kevin Smith; he's never met a lighting set-up or camera move that he doesn't just love. You remember the good parts of What Dreams May Come? Not the part with the awful performances by Robin Williams and Cuba Gooding, Jr., but the parts that took place in the afterlife/otherworld, the gorgeous, trippy visions of color and light? Imagine over two hours of that in the service of a story that involves vampires, psychics, a war between Light and Dark, and a car pulling a bootlegger turn on the side of a building.

Forget any kind of plot summation. Frankly, I'm not sure it's possible. You need to remember three things:

1.) Dark Others
2.) Light Others
3.) The Chalk of Fate

Yeah, the Chalk of Fate. Day Watch is like Bubba Ho-Tep; watch it for five minutes and you're either in or you're out. If you're out, I don't think you can (or should) be convinced otherwise. If you're in, well, you're in, baby. For the record, I'm in. I'm waaaaaaaaaaay in.

Day Watch is 132 minutes of ocular excess. It's Matrix-by-way-of-Dostoevsky sensibility is a direct jolt to your monkey brain. For me, any attempt to engage in orthodox criticism of Bekmambetov's opus (the middle episode in a trilogy; the third volume will be called Twilight Watch) is short-circuited by the sheer head-rush of his palette. Did I like it? I was laughing like a fool as I left the theater. Will you love it? I don't know, but you should at least give it a try.