Night Watch

Been meaning to watch this for weeks and with family Fletch camping out in the garden that night, I decided to make use of my free TV time. Brilliant opening scene, really sets the stall out (to use the parlance of an ITV football pundit) as you're thrown into an incredibly stylised battle between good and evil types followed immediately by a superb story-setter featuring a cackling Witch-hag in a very vivid red outfit, a tiger and a creepy spider thingy. Hello I thought, am in for a bit of a treat here.

Think this was the first big budget Russian film. It looks amazing too - director Timur Bekmambetov (who went on to do more show-offy work with 'Wanted') has a great eye for colours and perspectives. And mental action sequences. It's great because you can feel all smug and clever for watching a foreign language film whilst you're enjoying the freaky vampire deaths or the insane truck flips. Awesome!

Annoyingly though, in between thinking that the main good guy looked like David Mitchell and that a vortex of crows looks even better on screen than it sounds - I was suddenly attacked by the Snooze Demon. This meant I had to rewind a few bits to catch up and even had to watch the last 20 minutes of the film twice. In fact, I went on to watch the very last scene again the next day just to make sure I'd absorbed everything (I'm a big fan of absorbancy). What this does prove though is that Night Watch is a really good movie. Why? Because if it wasn't, there's no way I would have bothered going to that much effort.

I'm really looking forward to the sequel which is already at home waiting to be watched. Hopefully this time it won't take me so long to get round to it and I can keep the evil Snooze Demon at bay.