If you could meld the Lord of the Rings pictures with The Matrix, Blade and the Harry Potter films – and watch the result with your finger on the fast-forward button – you might get something close to this Russian import. Writer-director Timur Bekmambetov, adapting a novel by Sergei Lukyanenko, throws enough stylishness against
the screen that some of it sticks, but mostly this is assaultive in the manner of the worst Hollywood action flicks. Critics fawned, but if it had been released by a major American studio, they wouldn’t have given it the time of day.
