Here, the forces of good and evil, Light and Dark, are represented by rival armies who've done battle throughout the ages. Their Lord of the Rings-worthy struggle is recreated with all the heavy-metal urgency of an industrial rave as armor-clad opponents impale one another on exceptionally sharp weapons.

Suddenly, the camera pulls back to reveal the entire skirmish unfolding on a precarious bridge beneath a cloud of ominous black crows. What are the crows doing here? Why the bridge? And why, amid all the mayhem, do both sides freeze at the height of their apocalyptic confrontation?

Who cares? It looks cool, and that's the philosophy by which the film governs its eye-popping effects: Meaning doesn't matter, so long as the audience is impressed by all that eye candy. The rest of the film takes place in modern-day Moscow, where factions of both Light and Dark police one another's behavior. Hence the Night Watch, a special patrol dedicated to keeping the vampires and other magicians of the Gloom in line.

It helps that Night Watch never slows down long enough for viewers to put much thought into the story's logic. The effect is like watching a feature-length Super Bowl commercial, with the movie constantly striving to outdo itself in an escalating orgy of flash cuts and nightmarish CG visions, all set to the deafening strains of Russian death metal.

The idea of following such frantic action in subtitles -- which have been rendered to reflect the circumstances of their delivery (stuttering, bleeding and so forth on screen) -- is a daunting prospect. At a certain point, it's virtually impossible not to wonder how many of the special effects made it into the film merely because one of those 42 boutiques involved brought that particular technology to the table. Night Watch works better as a demo reel for the state of Russian effects work than as a first installment in an epic trilogy, all based on the novels of Sergei Lukyanenko (with Day Watch and Dusk Watch still to come).

Perhaps I'm being too hard on the opening chapter in what promises to be a formidable three-movie engagement. As exhausting an act of spectatorship as Night Watch represents, this bombastic first act suggests astounding possibilities if director Timur Bekmambetov -- whose vision puts him somewhere between The Matrix's Wachowski brothers and Amelie's Jean-Pierre Jeunet -- can sustain this level of energy and innovation across three films. That will truly be something to see.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]